Product Backlog Refinement

I want to introduce you to this idea of product backlog refinement. I've been with teams whose sprint planning sessions take, you know, six, seven hours, they're still not done, everyone's exhausted and all of a sudden it's, you know, it's day two of the sprint and we haven't got our sprint goals, we haven't, we haven't committed, we haven't planned our sprint well. Some of that can be caused by not having a well refined backlog. So there is this opportunity for refinement activities that should be occurring on your teams. I like to call that the product backlog refinement session. You could even have this once a week for a couple, three hours a week. It's a forward looking view. Not for the current sprint we're in, but coming Sprint or sprints as we're clarifying, providing clarity on that product level backlog. Of course the product owner will be engaged at this event because it's their backlog and so they're there to answer questions and sort of refine the most important pieces of work. Remember in the product backlog the stuff at the top, highest priority, pretty well defined, pretty well refined, lower priority, much less fidelity on that stuff. We're not too worried about, you know, priority number 73. We might never get to it. This isn't a project plan. The backlog is volatile and we might do the work in the backlog. Now some of the activities we might see in this product backlog refinement session include prioritizing and reprioritizing items from the backlog, maybe adding and removing items, merging or even splitting things together, and even high level estimations. And this effective product backlog refinement really sets the teams up for success during sprint planning, which is held every sprint. One of our five ceremonies, one of our five events. Product backlog refinement often is facilitated by the Scrum Master. Doesn't necessarily have to be product owner for sure needs to be there. You might send some tech leads to that. You may not need to send the whole team. There are times where you'll, you'll sort of figure this out. Maybe the whole team needs to be there. You're talking about architectural components and making some larger decisions that maybe not everyone needs to be at. You gotta just kind of play this one by ear. Don't skip it, don't skimp on it. Make sure that it's sprint planning. It's not the first time the team has seen the, seen the work they're gonna do. Get your good refinement sessions going. So that's a key, key factor to remember about this event. Product backlog refinement the session might flow like this or product owner would sort of read through the first, highest, two, three, six stories. Whatever it is, remind the teams of the product vision. You know, you're really kind of grounding in future work the development team members or tech leads or whatever the lead of the group is. Maybe it's the whole group would ask questions and sort of begin to think through how they might write stories to fulfill that product backlog. We might create those stories in that event, keep them in the backlog so that we're, we're really refining and breaking down these larger items. I put it this way, we're taking big rocks and making them into little rocks. That's one way to think about doing this. And of course Scrum Master could, could facilitate this event. So product backlog refinement not necessarily an event we see on the 353, but certainly an important component of your awesome Agile team.