Bring Focus to Your Refinement Meetings - Mike Cohn

Bring Focus to Your Refinement Meetings - Mike Cohn

Your team is spending too much time in product backlog refinement.
How can I make such a bold claim since I didn’t participate in your most recent refinement meeting? I can make it because the vast majority of teams spend too much time refining their product backlogs.
So I’m playing the odds, and betting your team is among them.
 

Teams spend too long in refinement because they misunderstand the purpose of refinement, so let’s start there. As a reminder:

The purpose of backlog refinement is to ensure the highest priority items are small and sufficiently understood that they can most likely be completed within a single iteration.

This means that during a refinement meeting the team does not need to get answers to every conceivable question about each backlog item. Some questions can be answered during the iteration without quashing the feasibility of finishing the backlog item in the iteration.
For example, suppose a team wants to know how long a failed transaction should be retried. Perhaps 30 seconds? A minute? Two? The product owner says she’s not sure but she’ll decide within a couple of days.

Even if the team doesn’t get that answer until after the iteration has begun, that’s fine.
The team should not need to have all questions answered or all open issues resolved before an item is brought into an iteration.
 

In this example, whatever answer the product owner provides about the retry duration will not affect the two concerns of backlog refinement:
 

• Is the item small enough to be brought into an iteration?
• Is it sufficiently understood to be completed within an iteration?

This means that the amount of time spent retrying failed transactions should not be discussed during refinement. (Actually it could warrant just the briefest discussion to confirm that the retry period is minutes—not months, because *that* difference could matter.)
From just this example we can see that some questions do not need to be discussed during refinement. Sure, the team will eventually need to know how long the product owner wants to retry transactions. But team members don’t need to know that during refinement. And they don’t even necessarily need to know it before starting work on the item.
Conversations between team members and their product owner during refinement should be focused on confirming an item is small and well understood. Discussions beyond that are often very fun, but they’re best had either during the iteration itself or possibly the sprint planning meeting.
Keeping off-topic discussions out of your refinement meetings will shorten those meetings with no adverse effect on meeting your iteration goals, which will help you succeed,

The Main Reason Refinement Bogs Down Focus on the Two Concerns of Backlog Refinement 

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