Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Post-PMF, the Field app squad (5 engineers, Ana, Karim) plans the sprint that ships offline mode release 1.
What the team took away
26 points selected for 37 days of capacity: the squad keeps a margin because the sync queue has never been built before. The goal is written on the board, not the list.
How to run it
Preparation
Invite the whole delivery team and the product owner. Stakeholders do not attend; they had the review for that.
Refine the top of the backlog two days before so every candidate story has acceptance criteria. Planning is not the place to write them.
Write the team capacity on the board before the session: days available minus leave, on-call and known meetings.
Agenda
15 min
State the goal Product owner proposes one sentence: 'at the end of the sprint, the user can X'. The team rewrites it until everyone can repeat it without reading. Write it at the top.
10 min
Confirm capacity Each person confirms their days. Subtract 20 % for the unexpected before anyone touches a story. Write the final number big.
45 min
Pull stories Pull from the top of the backlog one story at a time. For each, the team reads the acceptance criteria and says yes, no, or 'not ready'. 'Not ready' goes back, no exceptions.
35 min
Break down Split each pulled story into tasks under a day. If a story has more than eight tasks, it is too big: split the story, not the sprint.
10 min
Check against the goal Read the pulled list against the goal. Anything that does not serve the goal is a candidate to drop if the sprint gets tight. Mark it.
5 min
Commit Ask each person, by name, 'can we do this?' A silent nod is not a yes. Freeze the sprint when everyone has said it out loud.
Pitfalls
Do not plan to 100 % of capacity. Teams that fill the sprint deliver less than teams that leave a fifth free.
Do not let a story in without acceptance criteria because 'we will figure it out'. That story is the one that spills over.
Do not write the sprint goal after pulling the stories. A goal written to fit the list is a summary, not a goal.
Afterwards
The sprint board goes live with the goal pinned on top. Mid-sprint, the goal is the tie-breaker for any scope question. At the end, the retro asks whether the goal was met, not how many points were done.