Team Writing Own Sprint Stories: Enter Sprint Goal

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

How to align stakeholder and engineering expectations in a way that does not create mountains of technical debt that neither party wants to be responsible for?

Set a sprint goal.

Having a full story that explains what the sprint goals are aligns what the team will do and stakeholder expectations.

Simple, right?

The story format would be something like:

Sprint #1

Goal:
- implement feature A
- fix bug B
- recover technical debt from last sprint feature

Until now, I found any tool to align the engineering and stakeholder expectations to be a bit off.

Some are great for planning, at the same time, too rigid for changing conditions. Some are great for engineering to focus on the present, while not providing vision for future work.

Little did I know, I wasn’t using the sprint goal well