15 Smart Strategies for Engineering Better Scrum Meetings

You get a notification that it’s time for your team’s latest scrum meeting. Everyone hops on a call, goes through the motions, and ticks all the boxes. Each team member’s update echoes the last, “I did this yesterday, I’m doing this today, I have no blockers.” Are your scrums truly benefiting your projects, or have they become a waste of time?

If your scrum meetings feel repetitive, it’s time to rethink your approach. Swap the hours-long meetings for insightful scrum events that best use your team’s time. Explore unconventional meeting strategies, plus get tips for using collaboration software to get the most value out of your scrum meetings.

With your shortest meeting, the daily standup, taking up to 15 minutes, keeping your team on task and not wasting valuable time is essential. Even lengthier sprint planning sessions benefit from a clear meeting agenda—just feel the exhaustion oozing out of this Reddit post by user branh0913, whose tech lead turns a 30-minute scrum into an hour-and-a-half discussion. “This is also a momentum killer for me,” wrote branh0913. 

That’s not how you want your team to feel about your scrums. To keep your sprint planning meeting on topic, follow these tips:

1. Host a pre-planning meeting

The product owner and scrum master can meet before the sprint planning meeting to go through the backlog and create a sprint forecast. Doing this before the rest of the team is involved gives everyone more time to focus on finalizing sprint plans. 

2. Set a sprint goal

Use the first half of your sprint planning meeting to set a single goal for each sprint rather than going through the backlog.

“Sprint goals can be feature-oriented, but might also have a large process component such as deployment automation or test automation,” shares Jesse Houwing, a Visual Studio DevOps Ranger.

3. Create a parking lot

Teammates might try to bring up items outside the three daily scrum meeting questions, but those need to be tackled later. 

Instead, create a parking lot where you can capture any unresolved issues. Then, after the standup is over, schedule a chat to go over those issues with any team members who are directly involved.

4. Set a maximum—but no minimum—time limit

Your scrum master should track time spent on sprint planning and ensure the team doesn’t exceed your time limit. Planning can end early if the team wraps everything up before that time limit.

5. Focus on outcomes and benefits

Focus sprint reviews on outcomes and user benefits instead of listing completed tasks to help stakeholders understand the value of your team’s work. 

As the author of Driving Value with Sprint Goals, Maarten Dalmijn, says, “Your effort only matters to the extent it makes a difference for your customers and your business. Your customers don’t know or care how many story points or features you’ve completed.”

It’s easy to take your daily standup meeting beyond surface-level updates and spend too much time dissecting tasks. Meanwhile, the rest of your development team multitask on their laptops or stare blankly at the wall. 

Assign a meeting moderator to keep more vocal teammates reined in and invite introverted employees to contribute. Here are some ways you can encourage team-wide participation in your next standup:

6. Require everyone to define their tasks

All teammates should define tasks for each user story, bug, or project included in the sprint to ensure no one accidentally overcommits, a habit that can derail productivity. 

“When a team consistently fails to finish everything, the end of a sprint becomes an arbitrary, meaningless date,” writes Mike Cohn, an agile coach. “You want your team to instead think of the end of a sprint as significant.”

At the end of the meeting, ask everyone to confirm their sprint assignments. This ensures there’s no duplicate work, everyone has a starting task, and the team feels good about the sprint plan.

7. Allow time for teambuilding

You’re on the clock, but you shouldn’t discourage teammates from sharing quick personal updates or celebrating achievements. 

This can foster a stronger sense of belonging, which contributes to a 56% increase in performance and a 50% reduction in employee turnover risk, according to BetterUp.

8. Let your team run the standup

The scrum master shouldn’t run meetings. Instead, Scrum.org notes that “the developers are responsible for conducting the daily scrum.” 

This lets your scrum master focus on tracking time and ensuring nothing disrupts the meeting. It also allows your scrum team members to hone their communication skills.

9. Invite a guest reviewer

Guests provide fresh perspectives that lead to better problem-solving, decision-making, and cross-functional collaboration.

You could even invite a customer to your sprint review meeting, giving you a direct line to what your customers think and how they use your product.

Changing your team and organizational culture is no easy task, but you may need to reassess whether agile frameworks still work for you as your team grows. Here’s how change could benefit your team:

10. Don’t blindly follow The Scrum Guide

Former Ruby on Rails developer Alex Ponomarev wrote about how scrum added less structure and predictability and instead “highlighted the existing dysfunction” on their team. 

This led to growing tech debt and a snowballing list of backlog items. Even if agile methodology currently works for your team, it’s important to invite feedback to gauge whether the process is truly efficient or holding things back. 

For example, Ponomarev’s team realized that hosting daily standups wasn’t necessary, so they cut them back to weekly meetings. “Cutting them to once a week has worked like magic for us for years,” he wrote. “Don’t be afraid to customize processes to make your team happy and productive.”

11. Change your sprint length—or ditch sprints altogether

A two-week sprint may work for one agile team but not another. Similarly, the entire sprint-based approach may not be ideal. As AJ Shankar, founder and CEO of Everlaw, a cloud-based e-discovery platform says, the “relentless pace and unsatisfying nature of sprints has left developers burned out and quitting.”

Shankar’s team replaced sprints by removing deadlines and assigning smaller teams to work on specific product features. Similarly, Microsoft uses Kanban instead of sprints. Other alternatives include feature-driven development and extreme programming.

12. Make some sprints about innovation

Current Carta CTO Will Larson notes that most businesses create a new team to focus on innovating while existing teams are stuck in maintenance mode. However, this creates a “two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers,” resulting in lower morale and less knowledge sharing.

Balance sprint goals between innovation and maintenance to keep your team energized and excited while shipping necessary features to keep users happy.

Whether you’re part of a distributed team or meeting in person, visuals and collaboration software make it easier to communicate task updates, sprint progress, and any blockers or impediments.

Here are some ways visuals and collaboration tools can help teams use their time wisely:

13. Record demos

Teams can save time by recording quick video demos of their accomplishments before your sprint review. 

Loom makes it easy to record your screen while you narrate your achievement's challenge, solution, and outcome. Stakeholders can watch the demo on their own time and leave comments or provide feedback via a Loom video of their own.

14. Offer flexibility

Many engineers find themselves located halfway across the world from their colleagues. This can lead to status meetings that disrupt deep work, interrupt personal time, and clash with important errands.

For example, a 1 p.m. meeting for a teammate in Boston forces a coworker in Copenhagen to rush off from their family dinner to attend the same meeting at 7 p.m. their time. 

Loom facilitates teamwork and communication for distributed teams by capturing asynchronous video updates. Once you’ve finished recording, you can share a link to your sprint demo and let your coworkers watch it at a time that works best for them.

Stop trying to coordinate schedules: Find out how Loom’s marketing team hosts flexible weekly standups using video messaging.

15. Explain complex ideas and report bugs

You’ve found a bug, wrote your report, and now your teammates can’t duplicate it. It’s sometimes the unwritten law that when things go wrong, they miraculously fix themselves as soon as someone else looks.

Capture bugs in action with a screen recorder tool like Loom and show your team what you see. Because you can narrate while sharing your screen, teammates get the full context of what’s going on.

Similarly, Loom recordings help explain complex ideas and pull requests, reducing back-and-forth questions.

Scrums, also called events or ceremonies, include the sprint and four different flavors of meetings: sprint planning, daily standup, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives. 

Here’s a quick look at each type of scrum meeting and what you can expect:

1. Sprint planning

Teams hold a sprint planning meeting at the beginning of a new sprint to identify the highest-priority work in the sprint backlog and define a sprint goal. This includes defining deliverables and how to complete them.

Sprint planning usually requires one to two hours for every week included in your sprints. So, a two-week sprint starts with a two-hour sprint planning session.

2. Daily standup

The daily standup, or daily scrum, is a 15-minute meeting where your team discusses their progress, current tasks, and any blockers by answering these questions: 

1. What did I do yesterday?

2. What will I do today?

3. What’s blocking my progress?

Instead of being a detailed status update, the daily scrum requires teammates to share quick progress updates.

3. Sprint reviews

Sprint reviews, or iteration reviews, are often more casual than other scrum meetings. They’re intended to share sprint achievements, demonstrate completed work, and gather feedback from project stakeholders.

Teams usually dedicate 45 minutes to sprint reviews for each week included in a sprint. For example, a two-week sprint would include a 90-minute sprint review.

4. Sprint retrospective meeting

Sprint reviews and retrospectives might sound similar, but they’re different. While a sprint review goes over achievements, a retrospective analyzes what worked well during the sprint and what needs improvement. Ideally, your sprint retrospective goes over your team’s dynamics, processes, and tools to improve efficiency and productivity for the next sprint. 

What sets retrospectives apart is that management doesn’t need to be invited. This helps team members feel more comfortable speaking up about the challenges they encountered, which may directly involve a team leader. If management expresses interest in joining, let them know that their presence could keep some teammates from sharing, and remind them they’ll get a retrospective recap after the meeting.

Teams typically spend 45 minutes weekly in a sprint going through a retrospective. A two-week sprint would end with a 90-minute retrospective.

Your scrum meetings should be energizing and informative, not mind-numbing and draining. Using tools like Loom helps your team reduce distractions and end your next meeting on time and with clear action items.

You can create short Loom recordings to share daily updates, request and send sprint review feedback, and brainstorm creative solutions to sprint roadblocks. Loom videos give every team member equal time to share their voice—something that not every scrum meeting achieves.

Find out how Loom can boost your team’s efficiency and productivity in tandem with your current scrum practices.