Sprint Review / Demo

Timebox: 1 hour for a 2-week sprint. Who: team plus stakeholders and, ideally, real users. Owner: Product Owner.

Agenda

1. Restate the sprint goal — did we hit it?
2. Demo working software. Not slides, not screenshots
3. Say plainly what did not get finished and why
4. Collect stakeholder reaction and feed it into 📥 Intake
5. Product Owner talks through what is likely next

Output

• Feedback captured as new items in 📥 Intake
• A shared, honest view of where the product actually stands

Rules that actually matter

• Only demo work that meets the Definition of Done. Demoing half-finished work trains stakeholders to believe things are further along than they are, and the bill always comes due.
• This is not the retrospective. Review is about the product. Retro is about how the team works. Merging them means one of the two gets skipped, and it is always the retro.
• Unfinished work goes back to the backlog and gets re-estimated. It does not silently roll into the next sprint at its old size.

Common failure

The review becomes a status meeting where the Product Owner talks and the team watches. If nobody outside the team speaks, you did not hold a review.