Agile Like a Champion: 5 Scrum Events Every Winning Team Needs

With the conclusion of football days away, it’s impossible to escape the high-level teamwork, strategy, and precision from professional athletes in national media interviews. Expert analysis on team performance has begun to overtake network television, social media, and oftentimes my own living room.

These championship teams provide lessons we can learn from as we aim to win our own championships in business. Whether you’re leading a product team, running a project, or working as part of the team, adopting the playbook of champions can help guide you to victory.

While there are several playbooks to execute a successful business strategy, the most popular agile framework for champions is scrum. Scrum is made up of five events that guide teams toward their goal, keeping them on track when unexpected challenges arise, and fueling a culture of continuous improvement.

What is Scrum?

The scrum framework guides teams through the planning and delivery of a project, ultimately improving efficiency, effectiveness, and customer value. Scrum relies on cross-functional teams with clearly defined roles. These teams prioritize work by identifying and focusing on their most important tasks. Long planning and execution windows are broken down into smaller, manageable intervals called sprints. At the end of each of these time-boxed intervals, teams inspect and adapt, ultimately creating opportunities for continuous improvement, improving transparency, and identifying bottlenecks that may threaten a project’s success.

What are the three roles in scrum?

The three roles in scrum mirror the structure of a championship football team, with each role contributing uniquely to the team’s success. The certified scrum product owner operates like a head coach, setting the vision for the team and prioritizing plays to achieve the ultimate goal: winning the game. They analyze the competition (market needs), define the strategy (product backlog), and ensure the team is constantly working toward the most important objectives.

The certified scrum master acts as your team’s offensive coordinator, focusing on enabling the team to execute their plays effectively. The scrum master removes obstacles, optimizes processes, and ensures the team adheres to the game plan (scrum framework). Just as an offensive coordinator ensures the players stay disciplined and efficient, the scrum master supports the team’s collaboration and performance.

Finally, the development team parallels the players on the football field, executing the plan and adapting to challenges in real-time. They work together to move the ball down the field (deliver increments of value) and ultimately score (achieve the sprint goal). Each team member brings a set of specialized skills, much like players in different positions. Together, these roles create a cohesive unit, working toward a shared vision with alignment and strategy to achieve victory.

What are the five scrum events?

Within the scrum framework, five scrum events keep a team aligned and focused on an end goal. In the spirit of championship football season, we’ll take a look at these five ceremonies through the lens of pro-athletes and explain how you can facilitate Scrum like a champion.

1. The Sprint: The Game Itself

The sprint is a focused interval of work that sits at the core of the scrum framework. Compare your team’s sprint to a championship football game: the culmination of preparation, strategy, and effort as a team works together to achieve a goal. While a football game is time-boxed into quarters, a scrum sprint is typically time-boxed to one to four week periods.

When discussing sprints in agile project management, Dana Rousmaniere, the managing editor of Harvard Business Review, identified five key benefits shared amongst companies utilizing the framework. Sprints provide a structured way to start, guide movement from ideas to actions, maintain focus, promote sharp decision-making, and encourage rapid follow-up to sustain momentum. “If you’re trying to tackle a big opportunity, problem, or idea, sprints can help your team get it done,” said Rousmaniere.

Just as every play, pass, and tackle in football contributes to the final score, every task completed in the sprint contributes to delivering customer value, known in scrum as a potentially shippable product increment. Your team’s skills, collaboration, and adaptability will be put to the test, and your success depends on how well you execute your game plan.

2. Sprint Planning: The Pre-Game Playbook Meeting

Every professional athlete knows the big game technically starts before players ever set foot on the field. Coaches and players will strategize, visualize, and collaborate to identify the most effective plays and decide how to tackle the competition.

In scrum, teams call this process sprint planning. Sprint planning occurs the first day of a sprint. The product owner acts like the head coach, prioritizing tasks (or plays) based on the team’s goals and the needs of the stakeholders. However, the entire team should work together to establish the sprint goal. The sprint goal should be straightforward and clear, measurable, and realistic. Developers should define realistic expectations of what they can accomplish during the sprint and identify the route to achieving those results. By defining the sprint goal, the team aligns on what’s feasible, lays out the plays they’ll run, and prepares to execute the strategy with confidence.

3. Daily Scrum: The Team Huddle

Every play in football begins with a quick huddle: a fast, focused moment where players align on the next move. Your team’s daily scrum, or standup meeting, mirrors a championship team’s huddle. The daily scrum provides an opportunity for the team to align and identify potential impediments as they work toward their goal.

These meetings should be simple and consistent, with team members gathering at the same place and time daily. Try to timebox the meetings to 15 minutes, where developers can inspect and adapt the initial strategy (if necessary). Teams vary in how they choose to execute the meetings, with some opting for informal conversations versus more structured approaches.

Teams new to scrum can incorporate three key questions that have traditionally helped facilitate these standups:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What am I working on today?
• Are there any blockers or impediments standing in my way?

While teams have the freedom to pivot and make changes outside of standup, this quick alignment keeps the team synchronized and focused on moving the ball down the field.

4. Sprint Review: The Post-Game Press Conference

After the final whistle, the team and coach meet with fans, analysts, and stakeholders to review their performance on the field. In scrum, the sprint review serves the same purpose. Your team should take this opportunity to showcase the increment, or finished work, to stakeholders.

Through this review, your team will collect feedback to inform the next sprint. Did the team hit their targets? Were there standout performances or surprising challenges? This open forum provides an opportunity to celebrate wins and identify areas for improvement before the next game.

Information your team gathers in the sprint review will guide your product backlog refinement, another element to scrum which we will discuss further in this post.

5. Sprint Retrospective: Watching the Game Tape

Back in the locker room, athletes and coaches review game footage to reflect on their performance. They identify successful plays, opportunities for improvement, and adjustments needed moving forward.

The sprint retrospective is the scrum team’s version of this reflection. This ceremony allocates time at the end of a sprint to celebrate victories, analyze missed opportunities or blockers, and plan improvements to enhance the process.

Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland has called the retrospective the most important scrum event, explaining teams that do not inspect and adapt to improve their work do not understand the spirit of scrum. Retrospectives are vital in fostering continuous improvements, ultimately separating good teams from championship teams.

Reflection and review often result in improved performance and product. In a 2013 meta-analysis of debriefs in training and work environments, scientists found that organizations could improve their performance by 20 to 25 percent by debriefing. Retrospectives provide a worthy return on investment in creating a customer-centric product.

Product Backlog Refinement: Training and Conditioning

While product backlog refinement is not a scrum event, it is worth discussing in relation to effective product management and a winning business strategy.

Compare product backlog refinement to training and conditioning for athletes. These continuous activities provide a space where athletes refine their skills, condition their bodies, and finalize the playbook. Backlog refinement serves the same purpose for scrum teams. The team organizes the product backlog, breaks down large tasks, adjusts details, and prioritizes upcoming work.

While some teams choose to allocate time for refinement in recurring meetings, others work with an “as needed” mindset. Regardless of the execution method, refinement can result in better collaboration, clearer priorities, improved efficiency, greater customer satisfaction, shorter planning meetings, more accurate estimates, and earlier risk identification for your team.

Final Thoughts: Guiding Your Scrum Team to a Championship

Great teams aren’t built overnight, but through consistent alignment, practice, and improvement. By treating scrum events as the playbook for your team’s championship season, you’ll create a culture of collaboration, focus, and resilience.

So, as you watch the final games of the season, take a moment to reflect: How can you lead your team to its next big win? The answer might just lie in the principles of scrum. Elevate your scrum training with one of Hyperdrive’s certification courses today!