What is Sprint Planning?
Sprint planning is the ceremony that kicks off each sprint. The team reviews the prioritized backlog, clarifies the highest-value items, and commits to a realistic set of work based on its capacity and velocity. The output is a sprint goal and a sprint backlog.
Effective planning depends on preparation: the top of the backlog should already be refined with clear acceptance criteria so the meeting is about commitment, not discovery. The team — not stakeholders — decides how much it can take on, which keeps commitments honest.
PMs (or Product Owners) drive the "what and why" — presenting priorities and the sprint goal — while engineers own the "how much and how." Good planning balances ambition with sustainability so the team consistently delivers what it commits to.
Examples
- The team sets a sprint goal of "users can reset their password" and pulls the stories that serve it.
- A PM defers a poorly-defined story to refinement rather than forcing it into the sprint.
Where PMs use this
Related terms
Sprint
A fixed, short period (typically 1–2 weeks) during which a Scrum team completes a set of committed work.
Product Backlog
A prioritized, continuously updated list of everything that might be built for a product.
Velocity
A measure of how much work a team completes in a sprint, used to forecast future capacity.
Story Points
A relative unit for estimating the effort, complexity, and uncertainty of a user story.