An Agile team’s guide to sprint planning in Lucid

In this article

No matter how your team is Agile, this article will help you learn how to get the most from Lucid’s Agile-focused features including how to:

• Create an organized team hub and a team space to stay aligned and access your team’s most-referenced Lucid documents
• Align, coordinate, and execute on tasks by pairing a Dynamic Table with Lucid Cards
• Estimate the amount of time and work required for each task
• Get an in-depth understanding into the team’s workload and progress throughout the sprint at-a-glance
• Gain high-value insights and action items from your sprint review and retrospective

In this article, we use examples focused on a Product Development use case, but we understand that Agile practices are as diverse as the teams that apply them. We encourage everyone to use these examples to understand core functionality so you’re best positioned to use Lucid in the way that makes the most sense for your team.

By following the guidance in this article and maximizing Lucid features, you can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time executing on them. Let’s go.

Organize a team hub and team space

Having a centralized space for the team with high-value and frequently-accessed assets is a time saver. It can help the team make quicker decisions, collaborate more efficiently, and sharpen focus on the action items.

Before we look at how to create a team hub and a team space, let’s start by exploring the difference between them.

• Your team hub is the place to centralize all relevant documents for team collaboration and efficiency. In your team hub, you can see all members of the team in a team roster, create and find your team space, and quickly access recent documents.
• Your team space is a collaborative and customizable Lucidspark board pinned in your team hub that supports team-level coordination.

Check out the screenshot below for an example of a team hub. You can see the team space pinned at the top.

If you already have a team hub, access it by clicking the teams icon from the navigation bar on the left side of the Lucid Home Page. If you already have a team space, you can find it under the “Team space” header in your team hub.

To create a new team hub:

1. From the Lucid Home Page, click + New from the top-left corner.
2. Select Team.
3. After naming your team and inviting collaborators, click Create team.

To create a team space for the first time:

1. Open your team hub and click Get started under the “Team space” header.
2. Follow the prompts to complete setup.

When creating a new team space, start with a template when you want a professionally polished starting point where you fill in the blanks based on your needs. Start with a blank document if you prefer control over the entire creation process.

Whether you use a template or build your team space manually, there are many options in Lucid to make it your own. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

• Add embedded links to webpages and other documents your team uses often
• Add an organizer shape, like a Dynamic Table, to create and track tasks
• Add a Timeline to track the action items, deadlines, and milestones of each sprint 

Create and share your team hub and team space before the next sprint so everyone is ready when it’s time to start planning. Once created, you can revisit during every stage of the process moving forward.

Prioritize and progress on tasks

Agile teams need a way to have engaging discussions about what to work on, and doing that in a project management tool isn't reliably engaging or collaborative. But now that you’ve created a central team hub and team space, the team has a place to engage and get the most out of your collaboration together. 

We'll now focus on how to make your team space your own by:

• Adding a Dynamic Table for responsive organization of tasks
• Working with Lucid Cards to track and progress on tasks
• Getting the team’s input on lift with estimation points
• Utilizing reporting shapes to track progress and measure workload

Check out the sections below to learn how each feature can benefit your sprint and click the linked articles for detailed step-by-step instructions.

Centralize important details in a Dynamic Table

Lucid’s Dynamic Table is a responsive table that, when paired with Lucid Cards, gives the entire team a high level of visibility into critical details of the sprint. It can be used to assign tasks, estimate lift, measure bandwidth, and track progress. Check out the screenshot below to see a basic example of a Dynamic Table. When you create your own, you’ll find many options to customize and best fit the needs of your team.

To add a Dynamic Table manually, click the Organizers icon from the Primary Toolbar, select Dynamic Table, and click anywhere on the canvas. You can find detailed instructions to format and optimize your team’s Dynamic Table in our article.

Track tasks with Lucid Cards

Despite the many ways teams pair Lucid with Agile practices, we always recommend using Lucid Cards. Many teams plan sprints by adding ideas and backlog items to sticky notes to enable the quick capture of ideas. Once those items are gathered, convert your sticky notes to Lucid Cards to display critical information such as task status, estimated duration, assignee, and sprint start and end dates to help the team move from planning tasks to executing on them.

To convert a sticky note (or any other shape) to a Lucid Card, right-click the shape, hover your cursor over “Convert to card” from the menu, and select Lucid Card. From here you can input your information into the available fields from the Lucid Card context menu.

Once tasks are prioritized for the sprint and converted to Lucid Cards, click and drag them into your team’s Dynamic Table.

Use integrations

When moving deliberately toward a fast-approaching deadline, no one should be slowed down by duplicating work. If you use a system of record in addition to Lucid, you can utilize one of our many integrations to effectively eliminate the need to recreate them a second time in another program. Lucid offers integrations with Airtable, Asana, Azure DevOps Cloud, Excel, Google Sheets, Jira, monday.com, and Smartsheet. 

Whether you use one of these integrations or not, it’s easy to add Lucid Cards to enable productive visual planning and provide the most important task details at-a-glance. To follow detailed steps to Use Lucid Cards to plan, organize, and assign tasks, read our article.

Host a team estimation activity

When everyone has an unbiased way to share their opinion and make consensus-based decisions, the team is empowered to achieve their best work. Supporting collaborative estimation of tasks for the next sprint is why we developed our team estimation activity. You can always drag and drop a story point onto a Lucid Card, but with this activity, everyone can collaborate and agree on the estimate before it’s applied.

Here’s how it works. After adding the estimation shape bank to your team’s canvas, each person can click and drag their estimation to a dropzone that appears beneath the Lucid Card. When everyone has submitted their estimation, they are represented in a results window for review. From here, the team can discuss which estimation to apply to the task.

To see detailed steps on how to add an estimation bank and apply a winning estimate to a card, check out our Align on task estimation with your team article.

Track workload and measure progress with reporting shapes

It’s a fact—the less mental energy you have to spend manually tracking tasks, the more you have to actually get them all done. And who doesn’t like getting crucial information delivered in a clear and actionable way? This is where reporting shapes come in. Add them to quickly gauge the team’s bandwidth, track the progress being made on action items, and see how task assignments are distributed across the team. 

Reporting shapes are powerful tools to use in addition to your team’s Dynamic Table and Lucid Cards. They’re also dynamic shapes, which means they update automatically as each Lucid Card is updated to show a snapshot of how the sprint is progressing. 

Here is an example of Lucid’s reporting shapes working together to provide the team with visibility and key details of the sprint.

Keep reading to see how each reporting shape can bring even more value to the sprint.

Progress bar

Use a progress bar to see updated statuses on each Lucid Card as well as a sum of the estimates on each one. As the sprint progresses, the bar updates to reflect the team’s overall progress. You can see progress both in a bar chart as well as with percentages—perfect for updates in your daily standups.

Let’s take a look at an example. In the GIF below, you can see that when a Lucid Card is updated with the “Done” status, the progress bar updates to reflect it. Also, notice the percentage calculated at the bottom of the bar graph.

To add a progress bar, make sure all Lucid Cards include an estimate and status. Select the Dynamic Table and click Planning from the options that appear above the table. From the options, select Add progress bar.

Ownership chart

An ownership chart’s primary function is to show how tasks are distributed across the team using the estimates, or story points, attributed to each one. This can help the team quickly gauge whether items need to be redistributed or a pivot is needed. In the example below, we can see how each task estimate is used to calculate a total ownership percentage.

After an assignee is added to each Lucid Card, add an ownership chart by selecting the Dynamic Table and clicking Planning from the options that appear above the table. From the options, select Add ownership chart.

Make the most of your sprint review

At the end of the sprint, it’s time for sprint review. Use Lucid to set up a space where your team can share feedback and data about the sprint and how it supports company initiatives. Whether you’re all in the same room or you accomplish team goals in different rooms all over the world, we have the perfect template to recommend for you to make the most of this stage of the sprint. Click here to learn more and create your own.

Here are additional features we recommend utilizing at this stage:

• Embed videos, images, and rich media to highlight key performance indicators and drive conversation
• Use facilitator tools like laser pointer to draw attention, a timer to keep everyone on track, and utilize hybrid work integrations like Zoom or Microsoft Teams
• Show authors on sticky notes to see who added ideas and thoughts for discussion
• Use notes to keep track of discussion and follow-up items

Get actionable team insights during the retrospective

There are many benefits to getting the most clear and actionable discussion out of a retro. See the list below for features in Lucid available to help your team make the most of your time at the end of a sprint. You can choose to pair them with any combination of features listed in the sprint review section above.

During the team’s retrospective, we recommend the following tools:

• Turn on private mode. Promote psychological safety and get the most direct feedback from the team for discussion by adding a layer of anonymity.
• Use Visual Activities. Gain more insight with engaging and interactive activities.
• Host a Voting session. Get the team’s consensus on items up for discussion and decisions coming out of the retro.

Resources

To learn more about harnessing the full power of Agile in Lucid, explore the additional resources below. These resources are available in English only.

Templates

Here’s a list of recommended templates. Clicking a link in this list opens the template in your Lucid account so you can review the template and get started.

Backlog planning

Sprint backlog refinement

Sprint estimation

Sprint planning

Daily standup

Sprint review

Sprint retrospective

Courses

Agile Quick Launch workflow

Sprint planning guide

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