Sprint naming strategies to get the whole company involved
Them: I don't care, just grind the sausage faster.Â
Also them (at release time): Wait did I say sausage, I meant filetÂ
Working on a product is hard, especially when a large part of any product company is focused on other aspects of the business and can't always stay engaged with ongoing development. One of the most effective engagement hacks I've seen work at product companies involves one of the simplest concepts: Sprint NamesÂ
In the world of agile software development, a sprint is the only real measure of time that matters. Technically that's not quite true if you count keg-stand timers, but that seemed to have tapered off somewhere in 2018 when WeWork started regulating beer consumption...Â
Anyway, for those who may have stumbled here from the outside world (or one too many keg-stands) one of the fundamental principles of agile software development is to break problems down into smaller digestible stories instead of the behemoth uber-system projects of the past. You take these smaller problems and prioritize them for work during a small period of time and then come back to planning to adjust priorities for the next small period of time. This means an agile team focuses on whatâs most important now instead of trying to plan for lengthy waterfall development (where you usually don't know enough about the problem to accurately estimate what it would take to solve it).Â
This works great for the folks actively involved in product development day to day but can be harder to follow from the outside. Because the rest of the business is focused on, well, the rest of the business, we try to use sprint naming as a way to get people involved in what might otherwise feel like a mile-marker on the autobahn.Â
Here are a couple of the strategies we've used to keep it engaging:Â
Choosing a Good Theme
Put more accurately, choose a really good ridiculous theme that everyone can laugh at. The past couple years we've used these themes, and have scraped a set of rather remarkable SQLite databases to present candidates each sprint... feel free to download them!Â
One Hit WondersÂ
Tiny Towns under 100 PopulationÂ
B-MoviesÂ
Demo Days with Voting
Leading up to Demo Day at the end of a sprint, we usually open up the polls to the rest of the company for voting. If you win? Well, if you happen to choose the winning theme then one of your stories, ideas, bugs, etc goes to the top of the list for Sprint Planning the next week. If nothing else, this gets people that need something engaged and while they're distracted by ridiculous voting candidates they are usually also paying attention at demo day to all the things we're working on.Â
Release t-shirts based on the ThemeÂ
We've done this a couple of times and it always seems stupid at the time, but a year or two down the road those t-shirts become classic.Â
On the development side of the house, we also set up a competition whose winner gets to choose the naming theme for the following year. This competition is usually merit-based, because like I said earlier, our friends at WeWork kind of put the kibosh on the one true universal measure of greatness...














