What should a sprint plan include?

A sprint goal, the sprint dates, the team's capacity for the sprint, the backlog items committed to with an estimate and owner for each, known risks and dependencies, and the definition of done the team will hold each item to.

How do you calculate sprint capacity?

For each person, multiply the days they are available in the sprint by the focused hours they can give per day after meetings and other duties, then add the totals. Teams that estimate in points use their recent average points per sprint instead.

Should we estimate in hours or story points?

Either works if the team is consistent. Hours are easier to compare with capacity and to explain to stakeholders; story points avoid arguments about exact durations. This template uses hours because capacity is counted in hours.

How long should sprint planning take?

Long enough to agree a goal and a realistic commitment, and no longer. Teams that keep the backlog refined between sprints, so items arrive already understood, spend much less time in the planning meeting.

What happens to unfinished sprint items?

They go back to the product backlog and are re-prioritized for a future sprint, not carried over automatically. If items are left unfinished every sprint, the team is committing past its capacity, and the next plan should commit to less.

What is a sprint goal?

A one-sentence statement of what the sprint will achieve, such as "new users can sign up and reset their password without help". It gives the team a reason to choose between items when time runs short.

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Sprint planning template

A sprint planning template records what a team commits to for the next sprint: a single sprint goal, the capacity the team really has after time off and meetings, and the backlog items it will finish, each with an estimate and an owner. It is filled in during the sprint planning meeting and used every day of the sprint after.

Use it at the start of every sprint, whatever its length. The point is not the document; it is the conversation it forces, in which the team compares the work it wants to do with the time it has, and cuts until the two match.

The CSV is the “Sprint backlog” table; it opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.

#When to use it

When to use a sprint planning template

Your team works in fixed-length sprints or iterations.
Sprints regularly end with work carried over, and you want to see why.
A new team is starting to plan in sprints and needs a structure for the meeting.
Stakeholders want to know what will be done by the end of the sprint.

#The template

The sprint planning template

Fill in the blanks and replace the example rows with your own. Everything below is what the copy and download buttons give you.

Sprint details

Sprint name or number:
Start date:
End date:
Sprint goal, in one sentence:

Capacity

Work out real hours before choosing work. Subtract time off, meetings and support duty.

Team member	Days available	Focus hours per day	Total hours	Notes
Engineer A	9	5	45	One day off
Engineer B	10	5	50
Designer	8	4	32	Shared with another team
QA	10	5	50

Sprint backlog

Order by priority. Draw a line where the estimates reach the team's capacity; everything below the line waits.

Task	Priority	Estimate (hours)	Owner	Due date	Status	Tags
Sign-up form validation errors	High	6	Engineer A	2026-11-13	To do	Bug
Password reset email	High	10	Engineer B	2026-11-17	To do	Feature
Onboarding checklist UI	Medium	16	Engineer A	2026-11-19	To do	Feature
Design review of onboarding flow	Medium	4	Designer	2026-11-12	To do	Design
Automated tests for sign-up	Medium	8	QA	2026-11-18	To do	Quality
Update API docs for new endpoints	Low	4	Engineer B	2026-11-20	To do	Docs

Risks and dependencies

Waiting on other teams or vendors:
Known risks to the sprint goal:
What we will drop first if we run short:

Definition of done

Code reviewed and merged
Tests written and passing
Documentation updated
Accepted by the product owner

#How to fill it in

How to fill it in

01
Agree the sprint goal first
One sentence that says what the sprint achieves. When the team has to choose between two items later, the goal decides.
02
Calculate capacity in hours
For each person, count the days they are actually available and the focus hours per day after meetings and support. Add it up. This number, not hope, is what the sprint can hold.
03
Pull items in priority order
Take items from the top of the product backlog that serve the goal. Make sure each is understood well enough to estimate.
04
Estimate and stop at capacity
Estimate each item and keep a running total. When the total reaches capacity, stop. Leaving a margin for surprises is planning, not slack.
05
Give every item an owner
Each item gets one owner who will see it through, even if others help.
06
Name what you will drop first
Decide now which item goes if the sprint runs short, so the decision is not made under pressure on the last day.

Common mistakes

Committing to everything that might fit at the median estimate — half of those estimates will run over.
Capacity counted as full days, ignoring meetings, support and time off.
No sprint goal, so the sprint is just a list and nothing tells the team what matters most.
Large items that cannot be finished inside one sprint.

#In Kavanah

Kavanah drafts the sprint from your own track record

Kavanah's Planning page has a Sprint Planner that does the capacity arithmetic in this template for you, using how long your team's work has actually taken rather than how long it was estimated to take.

Draft against real capacity

Choose a sprint length of one to three weeks and the hours each person can give, and the planner drafts a sprint from the open backlog that fits inside them.

Learn more

Commit at p50 or p90

Estimates are adjusted by each person's own estimate-versus-actual history. Committing at the 90th percentile, the planner's default, leaves the margin this template tells you to keep.

Learn more

Import this CSV as tasks

Download the CSV and use Import CSV on a project's Integrations tab. The Task, Owner, Due date, Status, Priority and Tags columns become task fields; a row with no task name is skipped.

Learn more

Ask the agent

The AI agent can create a sprint, move tasks into it and report the team's sprint velocity on request.

Learn more

#Questions