The Design System Team's first sprint finished up, and really, there's no way it could have gone better.
A one week sprint in which we finished all our tickets, achieved the sprint goal, had enough momentum to launch us into the next sprint and everyone was super positive about the others' work and the progress we'd made collectively.
I presented my two suggestions in the Start category, had none in the stop category, and was obliged to breeze over my five or six Continues saying, basically, that we were off to a really strong start as a new team doing scrum and I hoped we could keep it up.
As we moved onto planning for the next sprint, we seemed to lose our confidence somewhat. We didn't seem capable of defining exactly what we wanted to achieve (despite my pleas for PRINCE2-like output definitions!) and we faltered somewhat.
A couple of folk started making comments that gave me the heebie-jeebies: "It would be good to see more tickets appearing in this column", "We need to go list all the things that need to be done and figure out how long each one will take"…
NO!
I launched into a speech about how we've been conditioned to treat the work as a to-do list of ticketed requirements when in fact it's a dynamic process that we're all feeding into and shaping as we go.
I couldn't have known, in the last sprint, that my techincal spike would have had such an active dialogue with Kyle's type scale investigation. Leaving ourselves that space to discover how things fit together is part of what makes this working method effective.
So yes, it does feel a bit weird to not know exactly how things are going to play out, but we need to embrace that uncertainty and trust ourselves to make the best use we can of the time. There's plenty to do and none of us will be left twiddling their thumbs.
And then everybody clapped 😜
Obviously not, but I had some heads nodding in agreement and the conversation moved on without some deferred requirement-gathering exercise being tabled, so I assume my point was well made.
END