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Your Sprint Capacity Planning Template Is Probably a Lie

Stop guessing. Download our sprint capacity planning template and guide to fix broken sprints, prevent team burnout, and actually deliver on your commitments.

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Your Sprint Capacity Planning Template Is Probably a Lie
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A sprint capacity planning template isn’t just a spreadsheet you fill out because your Scrum Master told you to. It's a reality check. It’s the tool that’s supposed to calculate how much work your team can actually get done in a sprint, dragging you out of the realm of wishful thinking and into the harsh light of day.
When done right, it factors in everything from PTO to those "quick" 30-minute meetings that are never quick. It gives you a data-driven forecast that helps you sidestep burnout and the endless, soul-crushing cycle of overcommitment. But chances are, yours isn't doing that.

Why Your Sprints Are Always Overloaded

Let’s be honest. Your sprint planning sessions probably feel less like a strategic meeting and more like an exercise in collective delusion. Everyone’s stressed, deadlines are always moving targets, and “spillover” has become a permanent fixture in your team’s vocabulary.
It’s not because your engineers aren’t trying hard enough. It’s because the way you're planning is fundamentally broken.
You’re not alone, though. This is a massive pain point for agile teams everywhere. Industry surveys show a whopping 68% of teams struggle to accurately estimate their capacity, which is a direct line to frequent sprint failures.
I saw this firsthand at a HealthTech startup. They were missing 70% of their sprint commitments—sprint after sprint. Morale was in the toilet. Once they finally adopted a real capacity planning template, one that accounted for all the messy, real-world variables, their completion rate shot up to 92% in just three sprints.

The Subtle Saboteurs of Sprint Success

The problem is usually bigger than just cramming too much work into the sprint. There are a few sneaky saboteurs that are probably wrecking your plans before you even click "start sprint."
  • The Myth of the 40-Hour Week: You plan as if every engineer has 40 hours of pure, uninterrupted, flow-state time. But their reality is a calendar packed with daily stand-ups, refinement sessions, company all-hands, and random ad-hoc meetings that chew through productive hours like termites.
  • The Cost of Collective Optimism: During sprint planning, nobody wants to be the buzzkill who says, "we can't do all that." There’s unspoken pressure to be optimistic, which leads to a plan built on hope instead of hard data. You're setting your team up for failure from the jump.
  • Ignoring the Hidden Workload: Planning almost always ignores the invisible work. Things like peer code reviews, mentoring junior developers, chasing down urgent bug fixes, or helping with support escalations. This "shadow work" eats up a ton of time but rarely makes it onto the capacity plan.
Even one small miscalculation can torch the whole sprint. Imagine a senior dev gets pulled into a "quick" two-day prep for a stakeholder demo. Suddenly, those 15 points they committed to are in jeopardy. This isn't just their problem; it creates a domino effect, blocking other team members and turning a well-intentioned sprint into a chaotic firefighting drill. It's a classic example of why knowing how to handle scope creep is a non-negotiable skill for product managers.
Overcommitment isn't a sign of ambition; it's a symptom of a broken planning process. True high-performing teams don't just work hard—they work smart by grounding their commitments in reality.

From Firefighting to Predictable Delivery

While many things can cause an overloaded sprint, the principles of building high-performing teams show that the real issue isn't a lack of effort—it's the absence of an honest, systematic way to plan.
When you don't have a realistic grasp of your team's actual availability, you're just guessing. This leads straight into a vicious cycle of overpromising, missing deadlines, and watching morale plummet. Your team gets used to the feeling of failure, which is the fastest way to kill motivation and any spark of innovation.
The only way out is to start by acknowledging all these hidden drains on your team's time and building a system that actually reflects the world they work in.

Building a Capacity Template That Actually Works

Forget those generic spreadsheet templates you find online. You know the ones—you download them with a burst of optimism, use them for one sprint, and then promptly abandon them when they prove to be more hassle than they're worth.
An effective capacity template is a living tool, not some static document you just check off a list. It's about building a system that sparks honest conversations and leads to realistic commitments.
Let's build one your team will actually use. One that moves you from pure guesswork to a place of predictable delivery. This isn't just about plugging numbers into a spreadsheet; it's about creating a single source of truth for your team's most valuable resource: their time.

Starting with Individual Availability

The first layer of any good template is figuring out the real, on-the-ground availability of each person. This is where most generic templates fall flat, assuming every engineer has 40 hours of pure, uninterrupted coding time each week. You and I both know that’s a fantasy.
To get an accurate picture, you have to account for all the things that pull your team away from sprint work.
  • Paid Time Off (PTO) and Holidays: This one's the easy part. Start with the total working days in the sprint and just subtract any vacation days or public holidays. Simple.
  • Recurring Meetings (The Necessary Evils): Tally up the time spent in all sprint ceremonies. This means daily stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives. And don't forget the company-wide all-hands or department meetings that sneak onto the calendar.
  • Ad-Hoc and Support Time: This is the silent capacity killer. Did a junior engineer spend four hours mentoring a new hire? Did a senior dev get pulled into a two-hour firefight with a customer support issue? Your template needs a line item for this kind of "unplannable" but totally inevitable work.
At a startup I advised, the engineering team was constantly whiffing on their sprint goals. Their original template only accounted for PTO. The moment we added columns for sprint ceremonies and a buffer for "unplanned support," their calculated capacity dropped by 25%.
It was a tough pill to swallow, but their very next sprint was the first one they actually completed in a quarter. This process is a foundational part of effective sprint planning that way too many teams just skip.

Introducing the Focus Factor

Okay, so even after you subtract all the scheduled time away, you can't assume the remaining hours are 100% productive. That’s just not how humans work.
Context switching is expensive. A developer doesn't just seamlessly hop from a code review back into deep work on a complex feature. There's a mental ramp-up period every single time. This is where the focus factor comes in.
It's a percentage you apply to the remaining available hours to build a realistic buffer for the natural chaos of a workday—the distractions, the quick questions from a PM, the mental fatigue.
A focus factor is your team’s honest admission that humans aren't machines. It’s the difference between planning for a perfect world and planning for the one you actually work in.
A good starting point for a focus factor is often between 70-80%, but this can vary wildly. A team deep in a well-defined R&D project might hit 85%. A team constantly battling tech debt and customer-facing bugs? They might be closer to 60%.
The key is to start with an educated guess and then tweak it over time based on how your team is actually performing.

Putting It All Together in a Template

Now, let's pull all these pieces together into a simple, usable template. It can be a basic spreadsheet, but it absolutely must include these core components to move from guesswork to accurate forecasting.

Core Components of an Effective Capacity Template

Component
Purpose & Real-World Example
Total Days
Establishes the sprint's timeframe. Example: For a 2-week sprint, this is 10 days.
PTO / Holidays
Accounts for planned time off for each individual. Example: Jane is taking 2 vacation days.
Available Days
The actual number of days each person is working. Example: 10 Total Days - 2 PTO Days = 8 Available Days.
Meeting Hours
Captures all recurring, non-coding commitments. Example: 1hr Planning + 2.5hr Stand-ups + 1hr Retro = 4.5 hours.
Buffer / Ad-Hoc Time
A pre-allocated bucket for unplanned but expected work. Example: We set aside 4 hours per person for urgent bug fixes.
Focus Factor
The crucial reality check for human productivity. Example: We start with a 75% focus factor for our team.
Final Capacity
The realistic number of hours you can commit to. Example: ((8 Days * 8hrs/day) - 4.5hrs - 4hrs) * 75% = 41.6 hours.
This table lays out the essential fields. When you build your template, it should walk through this calculation step-by-step for each developer.
This transparency is crucial. It lets anyone see exactly how you landed on the final capacity number, turning a mysterious black box into a clear, defensible plan. A simple formula to think about for each person is:
(Total Days in Sprint - PTO/Holidays) * Daily Hours - Ceremony Hours - Buffer for Ad-Hoc Work * Focus Factor = Realistic Sprint Capacity (in hours)
The vicious cycle of overcommitting, which leads to stress and spillover work, is something a good template helps you finally break.
notion image
This visual nails it: unrealistic planning is a direct path to team burnout and missed goals. It's why getting your template right is so critical.
Look, the goal isn't to perfectly predict the future down to the minute. It's to create a baseline that is grounded in reality, enabling your team to make commitments they can actually stand behind with confidence.

How to Calculate What Your Team Can Actually Get Done

Let’s get one thing straight: the biggest lie in capacity planning is the 8-hour workday. Nobody—and I mean nobody—gets eight hours of pure, uninterrupted, code-slinging time. Not even close. If your sprint capacity planning starts with that assumption, you’ve already lost.
This isn’t just about blocking off vacation days. Figuring out what your team can actually deliver means getting real about the dozen tiny cuts that bleed productive time dry. It's about quantifying the impact of all the “work” that isn’t the work.
Your team’s true availability isn’t a wish; it’s a number you can nail down with a bit of honest investigation.

Account for All the Time Sinks

Before you even think about a developer’s capacity, you have to be ruthless in subtracting all the non-negotiable time commitments. These aren’t distractions; they're the fixed cost of doing business in an agile world.
Start with the obvious and work your way down to the sneaky time thieves:
  • PTO and Holidays: This is the easy part. Get it out of the way first by wiping any full days off from each team member’s calendar for the sprint.
  • Sprint Ceremonies: Time to tally it all up. Daily stand-ups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint review, and the retrospective. For a standard two-week sprint, this can easily gobble up 6-8 hours per person. Don't kid yourself.
  • Company and Team Meetings: Don't forget the all-hands calls, department check-ins, or 1:1s. These are the ones people forget to count, but they can easily eat another few hours per sprint.
Once you’ve subtracted these scheduled events, you’re left with what looks like a healthy block of time. But we’re not done. Not by a long shot.

Introducing the Focus Factor

Even after you account for every meeting on the calendar, the time that’s left over isn't 100% productive. It’s fragmented by a thousand tiny interruptions and the heavy mental cost of task switching.
This is where the concept of a focus factor becomes your most powerful tool.
A focus factor is just a percentage that reflects the real-world ratio of productive, deep-work time to a developer’s total "available" time. It’s an admission that humans aren't robots and that the constant ping from Slack or a "quick question" has a real, measurable cost. A ton of research has been done on the high price of context switching, and your capacity plan needs to reflect that reality.
So, how do you find your focus factor? It’s part art, part science.
  • Start with a baseline: If you’re new to this, a focus factor of 70-80% is a reasonable place to start. This means you’re assuming that for every 8 hours a developer is technically "on the clock" for sprint work, they'll likely get about 5.5 to 6.5 hours of actual, focused time.
  • Adjust based on your environment: Is your team constantly pulled into urgent support issues? Your focus factor might be closer to 60%. Are they a heads-down R&D team working on a brand-new project with few interruptions? Maybe you can push it to 80% or even 85%.
Your focus factor is your team’s institutional knowledge converted into a number. It’s your defense against optimistic guessing and your first step toward a data-backed forecast.
The goal isn't to find the perfect number on day one. It’s about starting with an educated guess, seeing what happens, and then tweaking it sprint-over-sprint in your retrospectives. Did you finish everything you planned? Maybe you can nudge the focus factor up a bit. Did work spill over again? That’s a clear sign your number is too optimistic.

A Practical Example

Let’s run the numbers for a single developer, Alex, in a two-week (10-day) sprint.
  • Total Available Hours: 10 days × 8 hours/day = 80 hours
  • Time Off: Alex has 1 vacation day (-8 hours)
  • Sprint Ceremonies: The team spends 6 hours in ceremonies per sprint (-6 hours)
  • Other Meetings: Alex has 2 hours of 1:1s and team syncs (-2 hours)
After all that, Alex has 64 hours of "available" time. Now, we apply the team's agreed-upon 75% focus factor.
True Capacity: 64 hours × 0.75 = 48 hours
Just like that, Alex’s capacity plummets from 80 hours to 48. That’s a 40% drop from the naive, optimistic number. When you do this for every single person on your team, the difference is staggering. It’s the difference between a plan destined for failure and one that actually has a fighting chance. This is the heart of a capacity plan that truly works.

Using Velocity to Gut-Check Your Capacity Plan

So, you did the math. You’ve crunched the numbers on everyone's available hours, meticulously subtracted PTO, and even accounted for every last recurring meeting. Your sprint capacity template spits out a beautiful number—let's say 240 hours—and you translate that into a confident commitment of 40 story points.
Time to hit go, right?
Not so fast. This is the exact moment where so many teams fly their sprints straight into a storm. Capacity tells you how many hours you have; it says absolutely nothing about what your team can actually do with those hours.
That’s where velocity comes in.
Confusing the two is a classic, career-limiting mistake. Capacity is your input (time), but velocity is your proven output (completed work). Planning with one and not the other is like planning a road trip based only on the fuel in your tank, without ever checking your car's actual miles per gallon.

The Power of a Reality Check

Your team's historical velocity is the most honest mirror you've got. It’s the average number of story points they have actually completed over the last several sprints. This isn't a guess or a hopeful estimate; it's the hard, data-backed truth about their proven pace.
If your shiny new capacity plan says you can tackle 40 points, but your team's three-sprint average velocity is a steady 25, you don't have a plan—you have a fantasy.
That gap is a massive red flag. It’s a signal that hidden "drag factors" are eating away at your team's productivity. These are the insidious issues that never show up as calendar events but absolutely demolish your output.
Velocity doesn't care about your spreadsheet. It cares about what gets shipped. When your capacity plan and your velocity tell two different stories, you must listen to velocity.
And this isn't a rare problem. Studies show that a whopping two-thirds of organizations struggle with the misalignment between what they can do and what's demanded of them. A deeper dive into understanding key performance indicators is a great way to get a handle on this validation process.

A Startup's Wake-Up Call

I once worked with a startup whose capacity plan was a work of art. It was detailed, logical, and consistently pointed to them being able to complete about 35 story points per sprint. And yet, sprint after sprint, they barely scraped by with 20-22 points. The team was demoralized, and leadership was getting antsy.
The problem wasn't the hours; it was what was happening within those hours. By forcing a conversation around the capacity-velocity gap, we finally uncovered the real culprits:
  • Mounting Tech Debt: Small "quick fixes" were taking days instead of hours because the underlying codebase was a mess.
  • Slow CI/CD Pipeline: Developers were losing precious time just waiting for builds and deployments to finish.
  • Vague Requirements: A ton of back-and-forth was happening mid-sprint because tickets weren't properly refined beforehand.
None of this was captured in their hours-based template. The cross-check against their historical velocity forced them to confront these painful realities. It also pushed them to recalibrate their estimates, a core part of various agile estimation methods that focus on relative effort over pure time.
The team decided to dedicate a slice of their capacity to tackling tech debt, which temporarily lowered their velocity even more. But within a quarter, their velocity stabilized and then began to climb. For the first time, they were delivering sprints consistently. The capacity plan became the starting point, but velocity became the non-negotiable gut-check that kept them honest.

Making Your Template a Powerful Communication Tool

notion image
Let's be real. That sprint capacity template isn't just for your own nerdy satisfaction. It’s one of the most potent communication tools in your arsenal for managing expectations, negotiating scope, and—most importantly—protecting your team’s sanity.
When your plan is clear, data-driven, and transparent, conversations with stakeholders completely transform. The dynamic shifts. You stop being an order-taker and become a strategic partner.
Suddenly, you’re not just the person who relays requests; you’re the guardian of your team’s focus.

From Disagreements to Data-Informed Decisions

Think about the last time a "super urgent" feature request landed on your desk mid-sprint. How did that conversation go? I’m guessing it was painful. You probably said something like, "We can't do that right now," and were met with frustration and a lecture on business priorities.
Now, imagine that same conversation, but this time you're armed with your capacity template.
Instead of a flat-out "no," you present a choice rooted in reality. You can say, "Absolutely, we can look at that. According to our capacity plan, the team is fully allocated. To add this new feature, we'd need to move Project X out of the current sprint. Which one is the higher priority for the business right now?"
See the difference?
You’re making the consequences of their request visible and forcing a real conversation about prioritization, which is exactly where it should be. This kind of transparency is the whole point of many of the agile ceremonies we all participate in.

Becoming the Guardian of Your Team’s Focus

Your capacity template is your shield. It protects your team from the chaos of shifting priorities and the burnout that comes from a culture of overcommitment. It gives you the power to be the guardian of their focus, not just a passive conveyor of requests.
Here’s how you can use it to build trust and set clear boundaries:
  • Show Your Work. Don’t just present the final capacity number. Walk stakeholders through the calculation. Show them the PTO, the meeting overhead, and the focus factor. This demystifies the planning process and builds trust in your numbers.
  • Visualize the Impact. Use the template to visually represent what happens when new work is added. Show how a “small” request can push other commitments out of the sprint. A simple visual is far more powerful than words.
  • Forecast Future Sprints. Your template isn’t just for the here and now. You can use it to project capacity for the next quarter, helping leadership understand the long-term impact of their decisions and why you can’t just “fit one more thing in.”
I saw this work wonders at a SaaS startup where the sales team constantly sold features that didn’t exist, promising them for the very next sprint. The PM started bringing the capacity template to every single planning meeting with sales leadership.
It took a few tense conversations, but eventually, the sales team started asking, "What’s the capacity for next sprint?" before making promises. It was a game-changer.
Your template isn’t about creating rigid rules. It’s about creating clarity. It’s a tool that helps everyone understand the most finite resource you have—your team’s time—and make smarter decisions about how to use it.

Common Questions About Sprint Capacity Planning

Even with the slickest sprint capacity planning template, you're going to get hit with some curveballs. The real world is messy. People get sick, a new hire throws your velocity into chaos, and you can bet stakeholders will always question the numbers.
Here’s how to handle the inevitable.

How Do I Handle Unexpected Absences?

It’s Tuesday morning of a two-week sprint. Your lead engineer Slacks you: "Woke up feeling awful, OOO for the rest of the day." Suddenly, your perfectly crafted plan has a gaping hole in it.
You can't just ignore this and hope for the best. That's a recipe for a failed sprint.
Your first move? Immediately re-evaluate the sprint goal. Is it still achievable? If it’s a short-term thing (a day or two), the team might be able to rally, maybe by reassigning a critical task or collectively agreeing to drop a lower-priority story.
If the absence stretches longer, you need to have a very frank conversation at the next daily stand-up. Be transparent. Lay out the new reality: "With Alex out for a few days, our capacity is down by X hours. Let's look at the board and decide what we can actually complete." This isn't about piling on pressure; it's about being adults and adjusting the plan together.

What About New Team Members?

Ah, the classic capacity paradox: onboarding a new developer. You've added another person, so capacity should go up, right?
Not so fast. In the short term, a new hire is a net negative on your team's output.
They need time to get their bearings with the codebase, the team's quirks, and the product itself. On top of that, they're going to soak up a senior developer’s time for mentoring and code reviews, which torpedoes that senior's own capacity.
Your template has to reflect this reality. For their first few sprints, assign the new hire a rock-bottom capacity—think 25-40% of a fully ramped engineer. And just as important, you must slash the capacity of their assigned mentor to account for all that hand-holding. Forgetting to account for this dual impact is a rookie mistake that will absolutely burn you.

How Do I Explain the Focus Factor to Stakeholders?

Sooner or later, a sales leader or an exec is going to corner you with this question: "Why are we only planning for 75% of our team's time? That sounds inefficient." They see that 25% gap as wasted money, not a necessary buffer for reality.
Don't get defensive. Frame it as a strategic choice for predictability and quality.
Explain that the focus factor isn't about people slacking off. It’s an honest accounting for all the invisible work that goes into building software. Try an analogy they can understand: "A chef doesn't just cook for 8 hours straight. They have to prep ingredients, clean their station, and coordinate with the waitstaff. Our focus factor is the same—it accounts for the 'prep work' of development, like code reviews, ad-hoc problem solving, and just the time it takes to get your head into a complex problem."
If they still don't get it, show them the data. Point to past sprints where overcommitment led to burnout, sloppy code, and missed deadlines. Position the focus factor not as a cost, but as an investment in a sustainable, predictable delivery engine.
Ready to replace that fragile spreadsheet with a tool built for how your team actually works? Momentum integrates capacity planning directly into your workflow, automatically tracking availability and giving you a real-time, data-driven view of what your team can achieve. Ditch the guesswork and start shipping with confidence. Try Momentum for free.

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Written by

Avi Siegel
Avi Siegel

Co-Founder of Momentum. Formerly Product @ Klaviyo, Zaius (acquired by Optimizely), and Upscribe.