How Has the Product Goal Changed with the New Scrum Guide‪?‬ Agile Coaches' Corner

In this episode, part one of a three part series on the new Scrum Guide, Professional Scrum Trainer Sam Falco answers the question: "How Has the Product Goal Changed with the New Scrum Guide?"
What’s New in the Scrum Guide? The more I think about the new edition of the Scrum Guide, the more excited I am about the changes. Scrum is still Scrum of course. Nothing changed about how Scrum works or the value it brings.
But by stripping out prescriptive elements, Ken and Jeff have given us a Scrum Guide that makes its purpose and value clearer. Organizations that truly embrace this iteration of Scrum are going to supercharge their product development efforts.
Dan Neumann and I talked about the changes to the Scrum Guide in episode 106 of The Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast, titled “What’s new with Scrum?” That was a few days after the Scrum Guide came out. Now that we’ve had time to absorb the changes, I wanted to revisit them. In this three-part series, I’ll examine three changes that I think organizations using Scrum need to pay close attention to. And the one I’m going to talk about in this episode is the introduction of the Product Goal as the commitment associated with the Product Backlog.
The Product Goal and the Product Backlog As I mentioned in episode 106, a criticism that I’ve seen levied at Scrum is that it doesn’t provide a unified vision for the team to work toward. Without that vision, the team lurches from short-term goal to short-term goal and Developers struggle to understand what they’re building and why they’re building it.
It’s true that Scrum didn’t tell you to create that goal. Of course, nothing prevented a Product Owner from doing that, either, and the best Product Owners I’ve worked with did just that. With the Scrum Guide making that Product Goal an explicit part of Scrum, it’s going to make a big difference in the way people look at how they’re practicing Scrum. Here’s what the Scrum Guide has to say about the Product Goal:
“The Product Goal describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. The Product Goal is in the Product Backlog. The rest of the Product Backlog emerges to define ‘what’ will fulfill the Product Goal”.
So, the Product Goal is the why and the rest of the Product Backlog is the what.
I like that statement because it describes a future state of the product to plan against. I think this shows us what the difference is between a Product Goal and a Product Vision.
How Does the Product Goal Create a Broader Vision? You’ve probably heard of SMART goals. SMART being an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
A product vision may lack some of those characteristics.
Let’s imagine we are running a vacation resort and our vision is to become the destination of choice for travelers to our region. That is pretty broad, rather than being specific. It’s not measurable — or at least it’s not easily measurable. We don’t know if it’s achievable until we try. It is relevant to our business, but there’s no time statement in there. So it’s not a SMART goal. It’s inspiring, but by itself, that vision is not enough to give a Scrum Team what they need to know and how to move forward.
A Product Goal is a concrete step toward realizing that broader vision. It’s at the very least specific and measurable. We might not know if it’s achievable or realistic until we try. It might be time boxed, but it isn’t always. Sometimes, instead of setting a release date, the release boundary is the features the product must have. The release date is flexible. Often, of course, we have a time constraint. For our imaginary resort, we might want to make a new product available around the time people start planning their vacations for our tourist season.
So, our imaginary resort’s vision is to be the destination of choice for travelers to their region. What does a P