Why we started refunding clients
Clients don't complain about a missed sprint commitment right away — they quietly start double-checking our estimates, adding buffer to their own roadmaps, and trusting the team less. We wanted a guarantee blunt enough to force us to fix the estimation problem instead of just apologizing for it.
The guarantee, in practice
If a committed sprint scope isn't delivered — not "mostly done," actually delivered — the client doesn't pay for that sprint. No negotiation over partial credit, because partial credit is exactly the kind of ambiguity that let missed commitments slide before.
What changed internally
- Sprint planning now explicitly separates "committed" scope from "stretch" scope, instead of one undifferentiated backlog slice
- A scope can only become "committed" after a technical spike removes its biggest unknown
- Any mid-sprint scope change requires dropping something else committed, not just extending the sprint
The results so far
We've paid out on the guarantee twice in eighteen months, and both times traced the root cause back to a spike we skipped under deadline pressure — which the guarantee itself now makes much harder to justify skipping.