Scrum Canvas

Scrum Canvas

This canvas has been created to help teams navigate their scrum journey. The primary goal is to help teams focus on the most important pieces of the framework while also not ignoring the rest of the framework. This is not a replacement of the framework, but rather a complementary thought provoking companion. The canvas makes some assumptions, the most important being that you’re using all of the parts of the framework. This canvas won’t give you the right answers, but might help you ask the right questions.

To get started, work through the canvas together as a team. If the team cannot answer some of the questions, those are likely areas that need to be inspected first and foremost. Questions to ask might be “why can’t we answer this question?” and “what don’t we know?”. Other areas to be inspected might be sections in which the answers are ambiguous or not agreed upon by the team. We hope that by simply working through the canvas regardless of the answers, the team can and will identify areas for improvement.

Overview of the Scrum Canvas

Product Goal

Effective teams use both short and long term goals to navigate their product delivery by focusing on what’s truly important each and every day. Teams that do not use effective goal setting run the risk of focusing primarily on activity instead of a specific outcome for their customers.

1. What is the product goal?

2. How does the goal’s outcome align with a greater business strategy?

Customers and Stakeholders

The scrum team must understand who their stakeholders and customers are and interact with them often. Depending on the product and team, the understanding or relationship that a team has with its customers and stakeholders may differ. For example, some teams may know their stakeholders or customers by name while others may know them by a functional group or persona. These interactions are visible in 1:1s, UX discovery and feedback sessions, sprint review, etc. The closer a team is to their customers and stakeholders the more effectively the team can meet their needs.

1. How often does the team and product owner speak with their customers and stakeholders (outside of sprint review)?

2. What is learned from those interactions?

Releases

Releasing working product so that customers can use it is a foundational element of scrum. How and when releases happen (or don’t) can highlight different aspects of the team including self-organization, cross-functionality, dependencies, and product ownership.

1. How are release dates determined?

Sprint Review

Key and influential stakeholders that regularly attend and participate in sprint review, providing valuable live feedback, allow the team to adapt their product backlog before the next sprint begins.

1. How often do key stakeholders attend sprint reviews?

2. How often is their feedback used to adapt the product backlog at sprint review?

3. Who are the key stakeholders?

Definition of Done

The definition of done is necessary for fully understanding the work that’s needed to create a releasable increment and for the inspection of that increment at sprint review. The definition of done sets the standard for releasable and should be known by all team members.

1. How does the team use the definition of done to increase transparency and quality?

2. When was the last time it changed? Why?

3. What is the definition of done?

Undone Work

Work that is started but does not yet meet the definition of done is undone work and undone work is waste. It’s hard to estimate and when integrated into a done increment renders that increment undone. Releasing, planning, and forecasting (and much more) are adversely affected by undone increments.

1. How often does undone work prevent the team from creating at least one releasable increment each sprint?

2. How often is undone work carried from one sprint to the next?

Releasable Increment

Teams that regularly create potentially releasable increments of working product have more flexibility regarding releases. Flexibility allows the product owner to release strategically based on product goals.

1. How often does the team create potentially releasable increments?

2. When was the last time this happened?

Sprint Goal

Analogous to the product goal for the product is the sprint goal to the sprint. Teams that use effective sprint goals are able to learn, innovate, and be creative with autonomy during the sprint to achieve the best outcome.

1. How often does the team achieve their sprint goal?

2. When was the last time this happened?

Daily Scrum

Teams that focus on their sprint goal during daily scrum to plan their day, with low amounts of work in progress, create simpler and releasable product sooner.

1. How does the team focus on the sprint goal?

2. Does the team use this session to plan their day?

3. Is the amount of work in progress small, medium, or large?

Experimentation

The use of experimentation is crucial when working in a complex environment. The best way to navigate unknown unknowns is to hypothesize, test those hypotheses and then make decisions based on what is learned. Effective teams want to know what they don’t know and want to learn as quickly and responsibly as possible. These groups are constantly experimenting and measuring as they work towards realizing their future state.

1. How often does the team experiment as a result of their retrospectives or as a part of their product strategy?

2. What was the result of the last experiment?