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In the Agile methodology, software development projects progress through sprint cycles: short periods where a specific part of the project is completed.
As the project manager on the project, you are responsible for the end-to-end management of a two-week sprint cycle. And in every sprint, there are 7 things you should be doing to keep your team focused, clients informed, and everything running smoothly.
At the beginning of each sprint, you should lead a meeting with the entire project team to plan for the upcoming sprint. This meeting should take approximately 1–1.5 hours, depending on the length of the sprint. Ideally, it should be one hour per week of development. Get a feel for your team and the project and decide together what’s the appropriate amount.
In the meeting, you’ll do the following:
Review the backlog
You should review the backlog with the team and ask for their input. But, although a sprint planning meeting can be an opportunity to refresh items on the backlog, the focus of the meeting is not the backlog itself. You’ll maintain the backlog continuously; entering a sprint planning, the backlog is a reliable tool for the team to understand what their priorities and tasks are.
Determine goals
Working with the team, you’ll determine the goals for delivered product improvements by the end of the sprint. You rely on the priorities of the product owner, as reflected on the backlog, as well as the development estimates for each item.
Calculate resources
You should calculate what resources and team members you have for each goal, considering, for example: Who is working full time or part-time? Are there scheduled vacations for individuals or the entire team?
Prioritize
Naturally, you should complete as much high-priority work as possible during the sprint, subject to the availability of the team. But sometimes, certain backlog items may have dependencies that need to be addressed first. You may also decide to complete lower-priority items that are “quick fixes” or have been unaddressed for a long time, too.
Take notes
You should take notes during the meeting and draft a document that includes each team member’s tasks and deadlines. Then, you’ll send a written update (be it through email, Slack, or another tool), to the product owner, telling them the outcome of the meeting and what priorities are for the new sprint.
In Agile, the backlog is a list of specific deliverables for the project, organized in order of priority. Each discrete development task must be captured as an independent ticket on the backlog. Every day, you as a PM must review and update the product backlog for client projects.
Backlog items include:
As part of the backlog grooming process, your role is to make sure the backlog stays up to date with the latest progress, feedback, or changes. Updating can mean adding new information that further specifies requirements, linking to secondary articles that provide technical or design assets (like an architectural diagram or a graphic library), adding engineering estimates, and capturing open questions that need to be resolved.
You should also delete (or close) old tickets that have become redundant or irrelevant. A huge focus of grooming is reprioritizing the backlog to ensure that the highest priority items appear at the top of the list.
Another aspect of backlog grooming is preparing the next 1–2 sprints. Your job is to constantly go down that list and ensure that there are enough small-sized/estimated/planned items to fit in the next 1–2 sprints, and if not, break them down to reach that. You should take the items on the list and break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. So, the backlog should have smaller, more granular items at the top; the lower you go down the list, the bigger the tasks.
PMs should always be in contact with the team and the product owner and liaise between them when necessary. You should make sure the team is on track with their deliverables, or if anything should spill into the next sprint. If there are blockers, you should inform the product owner to consistently keep them in the loop.
Every morning, except for the days in which sprint planning meetings occur, the team meets for a “daily standup.” The purpose of the standup is to give all the team members face time to synchronize their work. This meeting should not exceed 20 minutes in length. If the meeting can end quickly, a shorter standup is perfectly fine, too.
You’ll lead the meeting by asking contributors what they have accomplished since the last standup, and what they plan to accomplish today. You might update tickets or move them across the Agile board as necessary.
For your team, the standup is an opportunity to communicate any potential issues they may be experiencing, questions they may have, or dependencies/blockers that need to be addressed by others.
Tip: keep it brief. The point of a standup meeting is to get in and get out. If a detailed conversation breaks out about a particular item, you should encourage the team members to take the conversation offline; you’ll schedule a separate meeting with those team members to address that specific point.
At the end of the standup, the PM should update the client with brief notes of the day’s meeting.
You should hold a 1 to 1.5-hour call with each client, each week to update the client on your progress, ask questions and resolve ambiguities, get feedback and product priorities, and delegate tasks.
Before the call, you should touch base with the rest of the team and ask if they have any questions or topics they’d like to discuss. You’ll also review the backlog to identify open issues. A day or two before the call, you should start a shared agenda between the team and the client, where everyone can add their discussion topics. Ask them what the design team should prioritize next. This will help the other side prepare ahead and come into the meeting with good insights or responses, rather than having to reply on the spot.
As a PM, you lead the conversation. Different contributors will speak at different times during the call (e.g., engineers will talk about the software, designers will talk about the latest designs, etc.). However, you must maintain control of the meeting by following the agenda, taking notes, and capturing next-step action items.
Within two hours of the conclusion of the call, you should email the client and your team a recap of the call and any action items that came out of it.
Every week, the project manager should coordinate with the dev team to prepare a demo with the latest updates, which is then presented to the PO. You can organize these during the weekly client call, in a different meeting, or in an async manner.
At the end of the sprint, after the update has been deployed and tested in production, you should organize a retrospective meeting that typically lasts 30 minutes to an hour.
The purpose of the retrospective is to reflect on this sprint. You should cover:
But the retrospective is also a great opportunity to celebrate wins, especially for individual team members. As a PM, it’s your job to bring out those moments of success:
Retrospective meetings are an excellent time to recognize and acknowledge the contributions of your teammates.
You should take notes during this meeting, but you won’t normally share these with the client. Keep them internally, and use them as guidelines for improvement within the team and processes moving forward.
Completing each of these 7 duties as a project manager will make sure that your team’s sprint cycle is successful: that you prioritize the right items, maintain communication with the team and the client, and deliver everything as expected. You are keeping the ship on course. While the project may at times feel overwhelming, much like Agile, these manageable smaller tasks will lead to the successful completion of the project.
