Agile Driven Impact
Hosts Diane & Erich Leonard discuss Agile "plays" for changemakers. Learn how to steer your mission, build resilience, and drive meaningful impact.
Agile Driven Impact
Pit Stop: From Big Goals to Small Wins — How Sprint Goals Build Momentum
In this Pit Stop episode of Agile Driven Impact, hosts Diane and Erich tackle one of the most common challenges facing teams with big missions: you have an important goal, everyone is working hard, but nobody really knows if you're winning. The fix isn't a better big goal — it's adding the layer underneath it.
Diane and Erich walk through how to bridge the gap between long-term product goals and the day-to-day work your team is actually doing, using sprint goals as the connective tissue. When teams have a clear, achievable focus for each sprint, something shifts — progress becomes visible, milestones become real, and small wins start to build the momentum that carries a team all the way to the finish line.
If your team is working toward something big and struggling to feel like they're getting closer, this episode is your starting point.
Evolving your work, accelerating your impact
So I think we've all been there. There's a team that has some big important goal. It's a grant due in six months. It's some new big product launch, some huge program rollout. Everybody's working really hard. Nobody knows for sure if we're going to get there. Nobody knows for sure if we're like winning, making progress.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that's that's the problem with big goals. They're motivating at the start, but they don't give a teams away to feel progress as they go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I think today's plan, 10 minutes or less, in out for a pit stop. We're gonna talk about one move that can fix that: the sprint goal.
SPEAKER_00What's the sprint goal? What is it? Well, um big goals live in the future, right? Big goals are outcomes. Launch this thing by Q4. Um, they don't really give you something that's a little bit closer, more tangible, right? That's that's an issue.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so having something that's shorter is gonna help us give people the opportunity to see progress, right? Maybe prevent motivation dips. Uh so when we've got those super long-running initiatives, a sprint goal is gonna give people the opportunity to check in along the way.
SPEAKER_00Right. Because uh, you know, if you don't have any milestones along the way, you don't have wins that you can start getting. You don't have checkpoints. There's nothing to celebrate until you get to the big thing at the end. Um, and teams can burn out sometimes before they get there.
SPEAKER_01Ken will burn out way before the end, right? Likely. So, all right, let's throw in here a real quick racing analogy. We'll throw back to our FSAE days. So if we think about what it means to win as a race car, as a race car team, uh if you were gonna win a whole season or a whole year's competition, that's gonna be the you're gonna need an approach that's got super consistent short-term goals and progress for each race or each test in order to like win the full thing, right? Right. Okay. We've we've been there, we've been on world championship teams, we've experienced it. Okay. Uh back to the real world. So when we think about a big goal.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the fix isn't a different big goal, right? It's putting something in between, putting a layer underneath. That's really what we're looking at, right?
SPEAKER_01All right, so layers, layers are good or levels. So if we say that like the product goal, and my gosh, is that our agile jargon, right?
SPEAKER_00But product goal where you're the midterm, midterm goal, long-term goal, whatever you've got to do. The big rock. The big thing, the thing that's really valuable out in the future that you want to accomplish.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so it's our higher level goal, and then the sprint goal or a short-term goal, a team-owned goal, something that is on a smaller scale on the calendar, that is our closer to day-to-day level. Is that what we're saying? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00The sprint goal is that bridge from the big thing to the daily work, right? So it's really hard to see how the thing you're working on today contributes to something that's way out there in the future. It's a lot easier to say, well, we've got this next step, this next increment, this next valuable thing that we can learn from. And that can bridge us to what is what is what am I doing today, this week? How does that contribute to bigger, the bigger goal?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so, man, do I have an example that comes to mind when I think about like those big things? Actually, it's one of the stories that we highlight in my book, Playbook for Changemakers. Alice Ferris was working with the Lowell Observatory to do a capital campaign where they had to raise more than $20 million in five years. Talk about long-term big goals possible for burnout, right? Whew, there's it, that's a big one. And what Alice did is she said, We are gonna set two-week goals because you're not gonna get a million-dollar grant or gift every two weeks. So, what are the smaller things we're gonna do that are gonna get us to that 20 million? And part of why I love that story by doing that, they were celebrating not every two weeks, but a lot. Yeah, they got to 20 million early. So having those small goals.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that is one of the great things about smaller goals is you can use them to accelerate, right? You can use them to measure your progress, you can use them to see how you're doing. And in my space, I work a lot with teams that are building physical products or hardware, and they often struggle with, well, I can't build something that quickly. And the argument is, well, sometimes you can, 3D printing, other things, but yes, sometimes you can't. And if you can't build something that quickly, then what is it that you can learn? Make your goals more about something you learn, some assumption you're testing, some risk you're reducing. Those are things that can great create a great sprint goal or short-term goal. And one thing that I think is really important as you look at this is the sprint goal should be one thing, one goal, one thing that unifies the team. So go to going to a racing example. If a car is coming in for a pit stop, there's a bunch of crew members that are working on that. The goal for them, that short-term goal, is to get the car serviced and back out of the track racing. Each individual on the team is still doing something different. You have a person with a jack, you have a person doing the lug nuts on the tires, you have a person fueling the car, but they're all working towards one common goal. So you don't need an and and and goal. You don't want a goal that says come into the pits and change the tires and fill it with fuel and and and you want to say get the car serviced back out on the track. That's the goal. So you want to have something like that.
SPEAKER_01Well, and I think once a sprint goal is clear, and it's a statement that's for the team, not individual team member components, but that it is a statement that is encompassing of what the team's working towards. Now the team can look at it every day, whether they're all together in front of a sprint board or they're virtual on Zoom or Teams and coming together for maybe a daily scrum, but then they can check in on progress towards shared sprint goal, right? That's part of what we want to see happen. Keep that goal right in front of everybody.
SPEAKER_00And it gets you from the idea of we're still going to we're almost there, which can make a really big difference in the morale, the motivation, um, and can reduce the anxiety about are we making enough progress and increase our focus on we're almost there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and so if we know that it's not just that we're still going, we're almost there. What do you like? What do you think about when a team hits their sprint goal? What do you experience?
SPEAKER_00I think you gotta treat it like a real win. You know, celebrate it, even if it's just for a short moment, get the team together, acknowledge it, let them know they did a great job, share the value that they've delivered with them so they can understand the value they delivered and maybe with others around them to congratulate the team on a win. And if they don't hit the goal, ask the team what they learned, right? You know, don't criticize too hard here. Just say, all right, you didn't hit the goal. It's okay, what do we learn here? What can we do differently next time? And let them learn from it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but I'm gonna do a little bit of foreshadowing towards a a person that we'd love to talk to, a different episode. We'd talk to Rob Hatch, who loves to talk about learning from success versus failure. And we think that this pit stop that points to it, the success of meeting a sprint goal, yeah, learning learning from the not hitting a sprint goal, but toward this moment, let's talk about celebration.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a really good point. If you want to listen to that episode, that's a great one because it talks about learning from that success. We always learn from coming.
SPEAKER_01Give it all away. It's coming up, it's coming up. Yeah, if you're binging, it's already there. If you're not, it's coming up. Yeah. But the thing that I want to talk about is really that celebration. People think that, oh, I acknowledged it. All right, now everybody get back to work, right? That's one method. Yeah, yeah. The other is, oh, but celebrations are expensive and they take a lot of money and they take a lot of time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And learning from success and celebrating success can mean something small. Dinging a bell in the office, having, I have a team that did a virtual dance party. Cameras off, but somebody would play a different song when they would meet their sprint goal. And so that was like three and a half, well, maybe just under three minutes if it's like current music, worth of just chill for a second to help the team feel that reset, the moment of celebration before they dig back in. So having that sprint goal be so clear. We know when we get there. It's a well, the racing equivalent would be like our finish line on the track. If that's not clear to a team, they don't know when they get to celebrate. We want them to know we did it, and we've moved closer towards our big product goal. And so, like, let's celebrate that for a moment.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00And I think, you know, then the team, as they're starting to win and they're getting these things, they believe that they can actually get there. They believe they can get to the big goal, and that really makes a big difference. So we want you to walk away with something you can take from this. Um, so what's our challenge this week?
SPEAKER_01I know everybody loves it. Our one challenge, the thing to try. And so this time, what we want to have you do is pick one big goal that your team's working on right now. And we want to see if you can write it into a sprint goal, something that's gonna be covered in the next like two weeks that you as a team could make progress on. Not a list of all the things that everybody's gonna do, but a team goal.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. I want you to share it, and then plan some small acknowledgement success when you hit it. A shout-out, a five-minute celebration, anything that marks the moment. And speaking of shout-outs, uh, thank you to our sponsor for this pit stop, uh, Agile and Nonprofits, AgileNonprofits.com. Free templates, guides, trainings for any mission-driven teams out there.
SPEAKER_01Yep. And they've actually got their uh big annual Agile and Nonprofits online summit coming Friday, October 2nd, totally free. And you hear directly from nonprofit practitioners who have put agile ways of working to work and they're telling you about what they learned.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, subscribe to this channel and share. Um let us know what, you know, let a team know that's working hard on something, how to get better at writing goals.
SPEAKER_01And in the meantime, keep driving that in. Keep driving it.
