mediumScenarioBehaviouralMidSeniorLead
Barely anyone from the business comes to your Sprint Review, and when they do it is a demo with no feedback. How do you fix it?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15Target archetype: Big Tech, Enterprise Captive, Product Startup
Answer
Short answer
Check whether the increment is genuinely usable before blaming the diary, because stakeholders skip reviews that give them nothing to react to.Then invite fewer and better people, ask questions that require a decision rather than applause, and be willing to say the review is the wrong forum for this product.
A sprint review without stakeholders is a stakeholder engagement signal, not just a calendar problem. Good stakeholder engagement starts before the review: make the review about decisions, risks, and product evidence stakeholders care about. If the sprint review is only a team demo, stakeholders learn they can skip it.
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Likely follow-ups
- Your stakeholders say they get everything they need from the release notes. Are they wrong?
- The one senior stakeholder who does attend uses it to request new features on the spot. How do you handle that in the moment?
- Your product's real users are ten thousand strangers, not people you can invite. What do you change?
- How would you tell a review that is failing from a review that is unnecessary?
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