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Weekly/Sprint Goals#

To foster better collaboration and transparency, we're implementing a practice where teams set and share their weekly goals. This approach is designed to help development teams stay focused on what truly matters.

Why This Practice?#

Focus on High-Value Tasks: Limiting the number of goals helps teams concentrate on tasks that offer the highest value, reducing distractions from less critical work. This common agreement of priorities ensures alignment within the team and prevents us from being distracted by the many lower-value requests we get.

Team Empowerment: Teams are empowered to set their own goals based on what makes the most sense for achieving their OKRs and sprint goals. While goals can be challenged, the team has the autonomy to decide their priorities.

Adapting to Change: Priorities can and will change. Teams are encouraged to adjust their priorities as needed. When this happens, PMs and EMs should post in the weekly goals thread to explain what came up and how it impacts the goals. Making these changes public helps everyone stay aligned and prevents "off-track" prioritization. If a stakeholder disagrees with the team's decision, the public nature of these updates makes it easy to challenge and discuss.

Open Discussion: By making goals public, we open the floor for discussions about priorities and alignment. This transparency helps everyone stay informed and engaged. Centralizing updates in public channels addresses the issue of "off-track" communication, ensuring better prioritization and transparency.

Identifying bottlenecks and improving: We sometimes face frictions or blockers repeatedly that prevent us from completing our goals. Caught in the routine, we might miss the pattern. Writing it down will allow us to gather data and identify patterns to take action as they appear as major issues slowing us down repeatedly.

What is the Practice?#

Each team, led by their Product Managers (PMs) and Engineering Managers (EMs), will set weekly goals or sprint goals and share updates in their team's Slack channel. This can be done on any day, as long as it is consistent. It is ideal to align it with the beginning of the sprint, the sprint planning, a mid-sprint review, the release cycle, etc.

Here's how it works:

  • Weekly/Sprint Goal Review: The post contains a copy of the previous week's or sprint's goals. Each goal will have an emoji indicating its status: completed, in progress, or blocked. If a goal isn't completed as planned, a brief comment should explain why (other priorities came up, unforeseen blockers or difficulty, etc.).

  • Setting New verifiable Goals: The post outlines a few bullet points for the upcoming week's goals. The number of goals should be limited to 1 to 5, depending on team size, to maintain focus. Goals must be checkable, and not just a list of activities. A goal should describe what will be completed, not what you’ll keep doing, making success binary. For instance, “Have the pull request ready for first review” instead of “Keep working on my task.”

  • Public Channel Posting: All updates and new goals should be posted in public channels to ensure visibility and open communication.

  • Tracking: Weekly goals completion percentage is computed based on the "Weekly goal review" part and tracked in Metabase.

Ownership#

  • The engineering manager owns the weekly/biweekly roadmap of the assigned product and is responsible to update, modify and share with stakeholders.

  • The product manager validates the weekly/biweekly roadmap and any changes to it.

  • The Product & Engineering teammates are consulted and informed when building or changing this roadmap.

Conclusion#

This practice is about working together more effectively. By aligning our efforts and focusing on high-value tasks, we can achieve better outcomes and ensure our work aligns with business priorities. Let's embrace this approach to enhance our collaboration and transparency.