Choosing sprint goals. Definition of Done.

If you're a perfectionist who suffers from analysis paralysis on a daily basis and struggle with completing your goals on time because of it, this is the video for you. Hi, my name is Polina and I've been using Agile for my personal projects and goals for the last 10 years. And on this channel, I share how I am adapting the tools and techniques I learned from working for tech startups in my personal life. Today we'll cover how to finalize your spring goals and I'll share one agile tool called the definition of done. That is the best tool I have found for overcoming perfectionism and analysis paralysis. And when you are not stuck in perfectionism on a daily basis, turns out you can get a lot more done in a much shorter amount of time. So it's a very helpful concept if you are someone who struggles with accomplishing all your goals and accomplishing them on time. If you've never watched my videos up till now, I recommend watching them in order they were published because there is some logic in how I've published them and one idea built on top of the other. So far on this channel, we've covered the idea of working in short sprints versus setting long-term goals, why it's better and why it's more effective. Then we've talked about backlog, what it is, why it's useful and how to set it up for yourself. We've talked about Sprints, sprint duration, and sprint capacity. Very important topics. We've also talked about sprint candidates. So you have your backlog, you've highlighted your sprint candidates, and you also took some days to think about them, ponder about, uh, what you want to focus on for the next sprint. How to actually choose the final sprint goals, how to finalize them. What are the things that you want to commit yourself to for the next sprint? And once we pick them, we want to polish them up with the definition of done. Most likely, it's your first sprint, the first sprint you've ever done. And the goal for this first sprint is for you to learn the concepts of Agile, to go through all the steps and just realize the power of agile and short-term planning. So there is no grand strategy on how you select your first set of goals. The more you go through the sprint process, the more sprints you do, the more refined your process will become. Like with everything in life, sophistication comes with experience. Right now you don't have experience, so there is not much sophistication going on. So first sprint, we're keeping it simple. When you look at your backlog, when you look at your sprint candidates, I want you to run them through these filters. First one, can you get it done in one sprint? Can you actually take this goal from not finished to the finished goal state in one sprint. So you've picked your sprint duration. Mine is three weeks. And if you haven't, just do what I do and pick three weeks. So can you achieve this goal in three weeks? If the goal is bigger than three weeks, then break it down. So that's the first filter. Can it be fully finished in one sprint? Second filter, the sum of all the goals that you've picked. should not exceed your sprint capacity. Again, we've talked about it before. You have sprint capacity for every sprint. It's different for every sprint because your life is different every month. The sum of all the goals should not exceed your sprint capacity. Third filter. This goal has been on your backlog for at least one week. So it had some time to age and I've talked about the importance of it in, in the backlog video. So it's been on your backlog for some time, at least a week. Fourth filter - you're still excited about it. It's been on your backlog for some time. So you're looking at it now. You're still excited about it. You still see the value of accomplishing this goal. And the final fifth filter is that you are the one person who can move it all the way from not started to finished. So there are not a lot of dependencies going on, unless you're using Agile and Scrum on the team level, then it's a different story. But if you're using it for yourself and no one else on your team is using Agile and Scrum to accomplish their goals, then make sure that the goal that you pick, you are in full control of getting it done. Because if you rely on someone else to finish their part so that you can move forward and do your part, it's not a very good goal to pick because you're not in control. I have a lot of readers who work in academia. You might want to put a goal of publishing your research, publishing academic article, great goal, but not a good sprint goal because publishing involves other people. It's the magazine editors, final reviewers. It's a bunch of people. But submitting your paper for publishing, that's a great goal to have because you're the one who clicks submit. And what happens after that, well, kind of irrelevant, um, and we'll see when it happens, then you can set another goal, but you should be able to move it to the finish line without getting other people involved. There might be some involvement, but it should be very, very minor. Again, you should be able to move it all the way to done in three weeks. Now let's look at the definition of done. So you've picked the goals and now we need to polish them. I'm sorry. I'm having Canadian geese flying over me right now. Um, okay. So polishing your goals by adding the definition of done for each for the goals. This is something that I hear helps a lot of people out, especially the ones who suffer from perfectionism and analysis paralysis. What is the definition of done? It's the answer to the question, "What does it look like when it's done? What does it look like when the goal is completed?" When you say you want to launch a website for your project, for your business, for your art, what does it look like? What do you mean? How many pages? What can a visitor do on your website? Launching a website means different things for different people. And if you just leave it at that, saying you want to launch a website, that's the perfect environment for perfectionism to come and ruin your life. Because there is no finish line in sight. You can always improve your website. You can always add another page. You can always add another feature. You can always make it more beautiful. You can always make it more efficient, faster, better. And how do you know when you're done? How do you know when you can say, okay, checkmark, I can go to the next goal. So you need to define it ahead of time. so that your brain knows the final state. What's the finish line? Again, depending on your sprint capacity, depending on your sprint duration, for you, launching the website, maybe just publishing the homepage with a short paragraph about your project, maybe a short video and your contact information. That's it. No additional functionality. Nothing a user can do on that website yet. It's just a goal for one sprint. For the second sprint, we can build more on the website, but for this first sprint, if you have more sprint capacity and maybe you have, you have done it before you have experience and you can do things faster, then maybe your definition of done can be a little bit more sophisticated. Maybe you can say, okay, I want to have three pages. I want a user to pre order something. Perfect. So how do you know when you created a proper definition of done? I've come up with this concept of the random person test. So when I explain it to people, I say, imagine yourself at the end of the sprint and your goal is finished. You've completed your goal. You want to be able to go outside and To the first major intersection, grab a random person off the street. You don't know them. They don't know you. They don't know your work. They don't know anything about you or your life. And you invite them over to your house and you point at your project and you also point at the definition of done. So you give them this piece of paper and you point at the, at your work and say, can you check if it's done? And this random person without much context can look at this piece of paper and look at your work and say, yes, it's completed. And there shouldn't be much discussion going on. So, as a result, when you create a definition of done, it should be exceptionally clear. It shouldn't have any subjective terms such as beautiful, efficient, easy, improve, simplify. These terms are highly subjective. What's beautiful to me is not beautiful to you. But if you say that you want to paint walls in your house and install a bookshelf and hang three paintings in your room, that's very clear. And the random person can come in into your room, look at your room and say, okay, I can see the walls have been painted. I can see a bookshelf and I can see three paintings. Yes. The goal is completed. If you want to apply it to your professional life. A lot of definitions of done boil down to some email that you want to send out or some form you need to submit, or again, in the example of academia, something you want to submit for publishing or for review. So this is the definition of done you want to say, okay, I want to send my first draft for review. And the definition of done is that email with the first draft is sent to my supervisor, to my editor, to whoever you want to send, to send it to. So that's the final stage. And if a random person can come into your office, open up your email, look at the sent folder and find that email with the PDF attachment, then they will be able to say, yes, this goal is completed. And here's the important thing. The definition of done, it's not all the steps that you need to do again to submit your first draft of your research, of your book, of your marketing email, whatever you're working on this. The definition of done is that final stage. The email is sent, something is submitted, something is published. But there are a lot of steps that you needed to do before that that doesn't go into the definition of done. That goes into weekly planning, daily standups, all of that. And we'll talk about it in the future. But the definition of done is it should fit on a simple sticky note. So how I usually do it is I create a sticky note for my goal so I can write, like submit first draft. And then I have a second sticky note with the definition of dancing that email is sent with the first draft to so and so. And I have those two sticky notes next to each other on my scrum board If this has not been enough, you can find more examples of my sprint goals and the definitions of done on my blog MonthlyMethod.com I've been writing this blog since 2021. There I have examples of how I applied Agile to home renovations, to finishing my grad school early, to what else... to transitioning my careers. And I dive into like all the sprint goals, all the definitions of done. So you can go and check it out. If you have any questions, leave a comment. I read them all. I respond to them all. You can also subscribe to my newsletter. On my blog, MonthlyMethod.Com, the link will be in the description notes. That way you are not missing any videos, any articles, because sometimes when I don't have enough time to record, edit, and publish the video, I can write the blog post much faster and send it to my newsletter subscribers. All the links will be in the description. And for now, enjoy your sprint, and enjoy the fruits of your labor, enjoy the fruits of the definition of done, and I'll see you in the next video. Happy Sprinting!