This article by Martin Hinshelwood entitled—If your backlog is not refined, then you are doing it wrong; inspired me to write this article.
Here’s the LinkedIn post with some valuable commentary…
I wrote the first edition of my Scrum Product Ownership book in 2009, then a second edition in 2013, and a final / third edition in 2019. There was a period of time from ~2007 to 2020, where I was spending a majority of my time teaching and coaching in the agile product space.
One of the top three topics I explored over the time was Backlog Refinement. I would often coach team refinement sessions as a means of exploring, explaining, and show good practices for emerging and maintaining a solid backlog.
Often other product owners would attend to observe it as a fishbowl learning experience. While I’ve found no process or recipe for effective refinement, there are a set of patterns that have proven to be useful.