Sprint Planning for Global Teams

The Scrum Guide says Sprint Planning is a time-boxed event of 8 hours for a one-month Sprint. In a distributed team, asking someone to stay on a Zoom call for 8 hours—especially if it's their evening—is a violation of human rights. When your team spans San Francisco, London, and Bangalore, the standard playbook fails.

The "Big Bang" Planning Failure

Many teams try to replicate the in-person experience: everyone gets on a call, the Product Owner reads stories, the team estimates, and they fill the bucket.

In a global context, this fails because:

• Cognitive Load: It's hard to estimate complex logic at 9 PM.
• Passive Participation: The people in the "good" timezone dominate the conversation. The others just nod to end the meeting.
• Waste: 80% of the time is spent clarifying requirements that should have been ready beforehand.

The Solution: Deconstruct the Event

Stop treating Planning as a single event. Treat it as a phase.

Step 1: Async Preparation (The "Pre-Game")

The Product Owner must have the backlog prioritized and stories well-defined before the planning window opens.

24 hours before the sync meeting, the team reviews the candidate stories asynchronously. They leave comments, ask questions, and even drop preliminary estimates (using tools like Planning Poker online). This forces the PO to write better tickets because they can't just "explain it on the call."

Step 2: The "Clarification" Sync (Optional/Regional)

If there are big questions, hold smaller, regional breakout sessions. The US devs talk to the US PO. The India devs talk to the India Tech Lead. They clarify understanding.

Step 3: The "Golden Hour" Commitment

Find the one hour where everyone is awake (e.g., 8 AM PST / 4 PM GMT / 9:30 PM IST). This meeting is not for reading stories. It is for:

• Confirming the Sprint Goal.
• Resolving any final estimation conflicts (e.g., "Why is this an 8 and not a 3?").
• Committing to the scope.

Because the reading and thinking happened async, this meeting can be done in 45 minutes.

Conclusion

Global agile requires more discipline, not more meetings. By shifting the "information absorption" phase to async, you respect your team's time and get better quality estimates.