Backlog Refinement

Timebox: 1 hour per week. Who: Product Owner plus whoever can size the work. Owner: Product Owner.

Also called grooming. This is the ceremony teams skip, and skipping it is why their sprint planning runs long and their sprints miss.

Agenda

1. Pull items from 📥 Intake — decide: promote, park, or decline
2. Write or sharpen user stories for anything promoted
3. Add acceptance criteria in Given / When / Then form
4. Estimate story points as a team
5. Split anything larger than 8 points
6. Re-order the backlog so the top is genuinely the next most valuable work

Output

• Enough Ready stories at the top of the backlog to fill the next 1–2 sprints
• Nothing tagged Needs Refinement in the top 10

Rules that actually matter

• Refine roughly two sprints ahead. No further. Detailed specs for work six sprints out is waterfall wearing a Scrum costume. Requirements will change; the effort is wasted.
• Declining is a real outcome. Mark it Won't Do with a reason. A backlog nobody prunes becomes a graveyard nobody reads.
• If the team cannot estimate it, it is not refined. Send it to a Spike instead of guessing.