Three parts to the meeting
- Why — the Sprint Goal. One sentence that captures the value of the sprint.
- What — selected backlog items. The Product Owner brings the ordered backlog; Developers select what they forecast they can deliver.
- How — a plan to deliver. Decomposition into work the team will actually do.
Forecast, not commitment
The 2011 Scrum Guide called this a "commitment." The word changed in 2020 to forecast. The shift is philosophical: a forecast is your best honest prediction given what you know now. A commitment is a promise. Forecasts that miss are data; commitments that miss are credibility lost.
↳ velocity as input, not target
Use velocity (avg story points completed per sprint) as a forecasting input, not as a target the team must hit. Velocity-as-target produces gaming: stories get inflated, work gets sandbagged. Velocity-as-input lets the team commit to a realistic forecast.
When planning goes wrong
- The PO arrives with an unprepared backlog → planning becomes refinement.
- The team forecasts based on best-case capacity → mid-sprint, half the work is dropped.
- No Sprint Goal → mid-sprint priority shifts feel like betrayal instead of trade-offs.