Team Writing Own Sprint Stories: Over Delivering & Technical Debt

I started an initiative in 2021 was to have the team start writing their own sprint stories - the series starts here

After getting the team re-framing their work, I worked with a way to get the team and stakeholders aligned.

This is difficult!

Stakeholders always want more - the team wants to deliver more. What’s the problem?

If the team delivers too much too soon - the dreaded problem:

Technical Debt!

Then the avoiding blame game starts:

• “We would not be in this problem if you didn’t ask for so much!”
• “We would not ask for this much if we would know about this problem!”
• “Things are so bad now with technical debt in the system, nobody wants to work or it takes way longer.”

How can one satisfy fulfilling stakeholder’s desires and engineerings capability to deliver in a stable manner?

I introduce the sprint goal to help solve this dilemma.