Sprint Meeting Prep
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Before your next sprint meeting or shadowing session, create an internal agenda for yourself using the format from the video: hours update, recap from last week, project updates, focus for this week, and discussion points or demos. Use the everything board in Teamwork to build it out, and stack rank items by what is most consequential to cover with the customer. Also check the planning workload view for your engineers to make sure you are not over-committing.
Building Your Internal Agenda
Now that you know the structure of a sprint meeting, the next step is how to prepare for one. The most effective approach is to create an internal agenda before the call — a personal run of show that keeps you on time and on topic.
Cam walks through a real example from a recent Mistral AI sprint call. The agenda covers the same buckets from the sprint meeting structure: hours pacing for the month, recap from last week, project updates, focus for this week, discussion points, and demos. This is what a strong internal agenda looks like in practice.
Use the format from the video as a template, or create something that works for you. The goal is to run the most efficient and most valuable sprint call you can.
Using the Everything Board to Prep
Most of the planning happens directly in Teamwork. Open the everything board — the same view you will use during the sprint meeting — and spend time reviewing it before the call.
Look at what is sitting in delivered from the prior week. Review what is in on-deck and what carried over as in-progress. This is where you build your snapshot of what needs to be on the agenda, what alignment is needed with the customer, and what discussion points to bring up.
If there is no sort applied on the everything board, you can drag items up and down within columns. Use this to stack rank what is most consequential. Not every task needs to be highlighted on the call. Something like resetting a multi-factor authentication for a Salesforce user does not need to lead the conversation — put the strategic, high-impact items at the top.
Sending an External Agenda
You can also turn your internal agenda into a customer-facing one. LeanScale encourages sending agendas to customers, especially when there are a lot of discussion points or demos planned.
Sending an agenda in advance gives stakeholders a frame of reference for what the call will cover. For functional leaders who are on the fence about attending, the agenda helps them decide whether the sprint meeting is relevant to them that week. It saves them time and sets expectations for everyone.
Checking Engineering Capacity
Before you walk into a sprint meeting and commit to deliverables, check that you actually have the capacity to deliver them. The planning view in Teamwork — specifically the workload view — is how you do this.
Filter for the engineers assigned to your accounts and look at their daily and weekly workload. You want to keep engineers as close to eight hours per day as possible. If someone is overloaded on a given day, look into the individual tasks and figure out what should move. If there is a spike mid-week, balance things out across the other days.
Cam gives a concrete example: an engineer named Christopher was way overloaded on Monday. The next step as an architect is to look into those tasks and either move things out or redistribute across the week to get closer to eight hours.
This step prevents you from going into a sprint meeting and promising items 1 through 25 when you only have the hours capacity to deliver 1 through 15. Looking at capacity holistically before the call means you are not making false promises of delivery.
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