Sprint Meetings - Explained
Note: The video covers material not in the guide below — please watch in full.
Action Step
Complete this before moving on.
Watch the full video and take note of the three main buckets of a sprint meeting: recap and review, this week's prioritization, and discussion and demo. As you go through the later trainings where you review real sprint meeting examples, refer back to these buckets and identify how they show up in practice.
The Golden Cadence
The weekly sprint meeting is what Cam calls the golden cadence of a LeanScale engagement. It is the primary touchpoint with the customer each week — the meeting where you align on what was completed, what is being prioritized, and what needs discussion.
Sprint meetings typically happen on a Monday, or at latest a Tuesday. Starting the week this way locks in priorities and gives the customer full visibility into what the team is focused on.
LeanScale communicates this cadence to prospects before they even become customers. It is part of the sales pitch deck. By the time you are running sprint meetings, the customer already expects and values this rhythm.
Rapport Building
The first two to three minutes of the meeting, while stakeholders are joining the call, are your window to build rapport. Cam is clear that this is not small talk for the sake of filling time — it is an opportunity to develop real relationships with the people you work with every week.
Rapport building does not stop after the opening. Throughout the entire call, pay attention to how stakeholders respond. Some customers appreciate high energy, others are more even-keeled. Match their style, but aim to be at least a notch above their energy level. Use the weekly sprint meeting as a valuable touchpoint to get to know the people on the other side.
Bucket 1: Recap and Review
Start the substance of the meeting with a quick hours update. LeanScale engagements are priced with a set number of monthly hours, and the customer needs visibility into where you are tracking. A simple callout like "we're at 35 of 100 hours for the month" prevents awkward end-of-month conversations. If you are running ahead of pace or getting close to the cap, this is where you surface it early — including any overage conversations if needed.
After hours, spend about five to six minutes recapping what was delivered the previous week. Use the delivered stage in Teamwork to see what was completed. This is your chance to take a quick victory lap: highlight what was finished and tie completed work back to the key projects on the engagement roadmap.
In the embedded model, ad hoc tasks pull attention throughout the week. The recap brings the focus back to the strategic, needle-moving projects that deliver the most value.
Bucket 2: This Week's Prioritization
This is the most important part of the meeting. It typically takes 15 to 20 minutes of a 30-minute sprint call.
Walk through everything sitting in the on-deck category — items that have been scoped and are ready to move. The goal is to get alignment from the customer that these are the right things to prioritize for the week. Sprint meetings can have three, four, five, even eight stakeholders from different functions, so this is where you make sure nothing gets missed and nothing gets prioritized out of order.
One technique that works well: call out a forecast of hours for what is on-deck plus anything that carried over from the prior week. This gives the customer a sense of how much capacity is accounted for. Customers sometimes have a large appetite for sending ad hoc requests throughout the week, and showing the trade-offs against the monthly hours budget early prevents traps later.
Bucket 3: Discussion and Demo
Save five to ten minutes at the end for discussion and demo. The exact time depends on how quickly you moved through the first two buckets, and you will get a better feel for this as you work with each customer.
This bucket is what keeps people coming back to sprint meetings. Use it to demo something you have been building — whether in sandbox or production — walk through documentation, or bring up a scoping discussion for an upcoming project. If something needs a deeper conversation, this is a good time to flag it and schedule a separate follow-up rather than blowing up the meeting.
Be thoughtful about what you bring in. You do not want to throw a wrench into the flow, but having prepared discussion items makes the sprint meeting feel like more than just a checkbox exercise.
Closing the Meeting
At the tail end of the meeting, recap any key decisions that were made and restate what the team is moving forward with. If something needs additional scoping or a follow-up conversation, commit to those next steps on the spot — and make sure they actually get scheduled.
Running the Meeting in Teamwork
The everything board in Teamwork is the view you use to drive the sprint meeting. You will find it by clicking the four-square icon in the Teamwork sidebar.
From the everything board, filter by client and use the columns to walk through each bucket. Delivered items feed your recap and review. On-deck items feed your prioritization. Grooming items are potential pulls into the sprint if capacity allows. The everything board gives the customer a visual that matches what you are saying — it makes the sprint meeting concrete rather than abstract.
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