Best Practices for Sprint Review Reports with POs – Any Templates or Tools You Use?

[Lisa Fren]

Hi Atlassian Community,

I'm looking to improve how we run our Sprint Reviews, especially in terms of how we communicate with Product Managers and stakeholders. I’d love to hear what best practices or templates others are using to:

• Update POs on sprint health

• Share sprint success metrics (e.g. velocity, completion rate, carry-over)

• Show planned vs completed stories or tasks

• Highlight blockers, carryovers, or scope changes

 Specifically, I’d love to know:

1. What kind of summary or report do you share in Sprint Review meetings?

2. Do you use a specific template or structure?

   • If yes, could you share a sample or outline?

3. What platform/tool do you use to present or share it?

   • Confluence?

   • PowerPoint / Google Slides?

   • Jira Dashboards?

   • PDF or Word reports?

4. Do you include qualitative feedback, demo notes, or just metrics?

We currently track metrics like velocity, SP planned vs done, tasks completed, and carryovers, but it’s all compiled manually in a doc. Wondering if there’s a smarter, more consistent way to do this — and what others find effective in keeping Product Owners informed and engaged.

Thanks in advance for sharing your process or any templates/tools that help streamline this! 🙏

[Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_]

Hi @Lisa Fren ,

I completely relate to your situation - streamlining Sprint Reviews and clearly communicating with Product Owners and stakeholders can be challenging. Our team has previously faced similar challenges, which motivated us to create the Sprint Report as part of our Time in Status app.

The Sprint Report was explicitly developed to address the kind of concerns you've mentioned:

• Sprint Health Overview: Quickly highlights the current state of your sprint, offering clear visibility into team progress.

• Metrics & Insights: Automatically tracks and visualizes key sprint metrics like velocity, story points planned vs. completed, completion rate, carryovers, and scope changes. This saves a significant amount of time compared to manual compilation.

• Planned vs Completed Work: Displays stories and tasks, making it easier to communicate progress against initial sprint plans.

• Blockers & Scope Changes: Easily identifies and communicates any blockers or changes in scope, helping stakeholders understand impacts immediately.

Feel free to check it out here if you’re curious: Time in Status - Sprint Report.

I hope this helps. I would be happy to discuss this further or answer any questions you may have.

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Lisa Fren,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

When it is about what to include in your project report, I would recommend having the following metrics & indicators:

1. Sprint Burndown / Burnup
2. Release Burndown / Burnup
3. Sprint Velocity Chart
4. Release ETA - Forecast
5. Epic Progress / Completion status
6. WIP Visualization (list of items in sprint, CFD chart, wallboard view, etc)
7. Project Key-Numbers (specific to your project: % Work Completion, open defects, scope change, etc)
8. Custom Metrics & custom Charts (specific to your project)
9. Time-In-Status - not necessarily something for the PO/stakeholders, but for internal team to improve their workflow

I would recommend using Jira dashboards as sprint reports. Some good reasons for this are:

1. you will have the sprint info centralized in one single page/place  
2. the info displayed will be in real-time
3. the dashboards are highly customizable. Jira provides some useful gadgets, but you can add more by installing apps from Atlassian Marketplace
4. the dashboards can be shared with team members and other project stakeholders
5. the dashboards can be easily cloned, in case you have multiple teams and want to use the same template
6. the dashboards in Jira can run in wallboard-mode, so you can project them on TV screens in the open space and use them as information radiators

A good alternative to the Jira dashboards would be the Confluence pages, for almost the same reasons. In addition, they have advantage of allowing you to complete the charts/diagrams with custom texts, so you can add your own notes/conclusions to the report.

If you want to try this approach, I would recommend looking over our Great Gadgets app, which offers many useful gadgets for tracking agile projects through Jira dashboards or Confluence pages in a very effective & efficient manner.

Template of Jira dashboard for Scrum project:

Template of a Scrum project report in form of Confluence page:

See also these articles: 

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/10-gadgets-for-a-powerful-Scrum-dashboard-in-Jira/ba-p/1683063

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/How-to-track-scaled-agile-SAFe-projects-in-Jira-with-Great/ba-p/1929694

Danut.

[Lisa Fren]

Hi Danut - Thanks for your prompt reply and detailed explanation. While the reports you shared are definitely helpful, I’m looking for something a bit simpler and more accessible — ideally templates that my PM can quickly refer to, either directly in their emails or via GDrive. Something that gives a quick summary of the sprint, including key details like: planned vs done, sprint success/failure, major impediments etc..