Sprint Goals!
Summary
Once everyone’s happy that the work is doable (to their understanding) and are aligned that this will help achieve the goal, the Sprint can start. Reporting is much easier too - rather than taking “the sprint board” to the stakeholders, or even worse, transcribing it into Excel and changing stuff (please don’t) - you can communicate the goal itself. Don’t get too distracted by attempts to find the exact magic incantation - I’ve witnessed teams say “keep it in a tweet” (back in the 140 character limit days), or stick to a sentence. An iteration, therefore, is a dash towards challenging assumptions, reducing the risk, gathering data from your experimentation and increasing our understanding. Very often this aligns with key business metrics, which then helps you further understand how your product is used by the end users, so you can perform future iterations!