The Backlog Refinement Meeting: Your Guide to Getting it Right [with free template]

As a busy Product Manager, you want to make sure that every meeting you have is effective. You don’t want to host meetings for the sake of meetings, and you certainly don’t want participants to leave one with more questions than answers, do you?

Hosting a backlog refinement meeting can be a great way to collaboratively clean up your product backlog – but only if you do it right. 

With so many misconceptions about backlog refinement meetings, their purpose, and whether it’s the same as sprint planning (we’ll get to that), it can be easy to get the wrong end of the stick. 

In this article, we’ll explain what product backlog refinement is and give you everything you need to know to nail your next backlog refinement meeting.

What do I need to know before hosting a backlog refinement meeting?

There are a couple of things to know before jumping into a backlog refinement meeting. As they say, you can’t run before you can walk. As a product person, you’ll likely know this stuff, but it’s worth going over again.  

You need to be clear on exactly what a product backlog is

The product backlog is an ever-changing, dynamic list of ideas, features, changes, and fixes representing what could be done to a product.

That ‘could‘ is a very important distinction.

Although they’re often confused for each other, a product backlog is not the same as a development backlog.  

A development backlog is a list of tasks and tickets you should complete. Think of it as a to-do list. It’s an organized list of what needs to happen to a product. 

A product backlog, on the other hand, is different, as it lists every action you could do to improve a product. Think of these as opportunities and ideas; not things you need to action just yet. It’s best to avoid combining the two, as it stops your team from getting confused and fosters more creativity while exploring new solutions.

Just as an aside, ProdPad is designed to help teams keep product and development backlogs separate. This gives Product Managers like yourself space for strategic thinking and enables more effective backlog refinement.

You need to know what backlog refinement involves

The backlog is a place to store ideas worth exploring. It’ll contain good ideas, and it will undoubtedly contain bad ideas, too. That’s where backlog refinement comes in. 

Backlog refinement, also known as backlog grooming, is the process of reviewing, refining, and re-prioritizing the items and tasks in your product backlog. This is done to keep your ideas organized, up-to-date, and qualified.

Some people also call this process idea triaging, but whatever you call it, this task is designed to identify the ideas that have legs and eliminate the others that may not match your current vision or goal. This leaves you with a better product backlog from which you can move items through your Product Management process.

What is a backlog refinement meeting?

The backlog refinement meeting is a pre-scheduled, recurring time slot where you and the wider product team analyze your current backlog items together to reprioritize or remove ideas.

Backlog refinement is something that a Product Manager will actually be doing continuously, on their own, as part of the day job. But, hosting a backlog refinement session turns the activity into a collaborative effort, helping teams to clarify objectives, requirements, and priorities together. 

What are the key benefits of a backlog refinement meeting?

While it may sometimes feel like backlog refinement is a chore (we’ve been known to refer to it as ‘grunt work’ here at ProdPad, and it’s fundamentally one of the things our tool helps you spend less time doing!), the fact remains that it’s crucial to your role as Product Manager. Hosting regular backlog refinement meetings that match your sprint cycle offers multiple benefits, such as: 

Better visibility

Having a backlog refinement meeting, rather than just doing it on your own, will help the rest of the team (including the Developers) understand what work is coming down the pipeline and gives them a shared understanding of what they should be prepared for. 

It’s also a great way of helping them understand why certain product ideas are on their to-do list. This can be a real game-changer when it comes to the wider team understanding their contribution to the overall product strategy and business goals. 

Adaptability

As you develop your product, the requirements can change based on many factors. A feature once set to improve a product may no longer be effective or relevant as time goes on. To combat this, your whole team needs to be flexible. 

When you include the wider team in these meetings, they’ll be involved in the process of shifting priorities and regularly see how adaptable the product backlog is. This can open their eyes to the importance of staying flexible. Fostering this mindset allows you to be better at responding to new discoveries and customer behavior.

Regular improvement

By refining your product backlog together as a team, you’ll be helping to support and cultivate a culture of continuous improvement. 

When everyone is exposed to the analysis you do and the decisions you make as a result, you stand the greatest chance of making build-measure-learn a habit for the entire team. They will be used to learning from past experiences and making changes to optimize their approach.

Who should run a backlog refinement meeting?

As the Product Manager or Owner, you likely already take the lead in grooming the product backlog. Because you work with it pretty much every day, It’s only right that you’re in charge of the backlog refinement meeting. 

Being the lead in this meeting, the buck stops with you. You’ll be the facilitator of this collaborative session but also the primary decision-maker. As the person running the meeting, it’s down to you to set the agenda, do the initial prep work, and organize the session. 

How should I prepare for a backlog refinement meeting?

To ensure your meeting is successful, it’s a good idea to have a structure in place. So it’s worth doing some prep before you head into your session with the team.

Thoroughly preparing for a backlog refinement meeting will undoubtedly help you run a more effective session. By knowing beforehand what’s required of you as a Product Manager, you’ll always be one step ahead.

1. Review backlog items

Before stepping into a backlog refinement meeting, you should complete an initial review of the items in the backlog. As a product develops and requirements change, some items in your backlog may not be relevant anymore. It’s your responsibility to remove them. There’s no point wasting time discussing ideas that you know aren’t relevant anymore.

Consider this an initial, independent screening of the backlog before the main deep-dive with the other meeting participants.

2. Prioritize the items with added details

It’s not enough to present a list of relevant backlog items in a refinement meeting. You should also have a first stab at a priority order.

By re-prioritizing your product backlog before a refinement session, you’ll save time and help your team focus on the most relevant items that offer the most value to your business. Sure, you can discuss as a team whether you should rejigg the order of your Now column, but at least you won’t be starting from a completely disorganized list of ideas. 

To find out more about how best to prioritize your backlog, explore the ProdPad Priority Chart to automatically visualize the ideas worth working on or read up on prioritization frameworks like MoSCOW, Buy-a-feature, Cost-of-delay, Kano and RICE Scoring.

3. Create a meeting agenda

Going into a meeting of any kind – not just a refinement meeting – without an agenda is like trying to drive without a map. Yes, you may know the route and where you need to go, but you’re more likely to take a wrong turn and get lost. 

Having an agenda helps keep everyone focused and on topic, as it provides the blueprint of what will be discussed. An agenda often contains a rough, estimated timeframe for each item, preventing meetings from overrunning.

As the Product Manager or Owner, you should send an agenda before the meeting to set and manage expectations. Include details like the date, team members who should be there, and a running order. If you need help producing a backlog refinement meeting agenda, we’ve got another great template you can use. 

Who should attend a backlog refinement meeting?

When sending out your now expertly crafted meeting agenda, make sure to send it to the right people. Backlog refinement meetings can be complex and, for that reason, run a full hour. If a team member is present when they really don’t need to be, they won’t be happy with you!  . To keep your meetings effective, and avoid tanking productivity for people who don’t need to be involved, only invite the necessary people. 

The people who should attend are: 

• Development team members (scrum team)
• The Scrum Master
• The Product Owner (if you have a separate person with this job title and it’s not just part of your role as PM)
• The Product Manager (chairing the meeting)

If you’re unclear on the differences between some of these roles, we offer more insight about the Scrum Master vs the Product Owner, as well as explanation of Product Owner vs Product Manager.

How often should you run a backlog refinement session?

How often you hold a refinement meeting depends on how long your business runs an agile sprint cycle. If your team runs in weekly sprints, hold a weekly backlog refinement session to match this pace. 

If sprints last for two weeks, run your meeting every two weeks, a couple of days before the upcoming sprint. For longer sprints, the sweet spot remains every other week, as this helps the team prepare for any changes and tackle any issues. 

When you meet, aim for an hour-long session so that you have enough time to tackle the entire backlog.

How do you run a backlog refinement meeting?

There are a few core things you need to do in a backlog refinement meeting to make sure that all the items are as optimized as they can be. 

As a rule of thumb, most refinement sessions follow this general structure: 

• Introduce the meeting and set expected outcomes (5 minutes)
• Review the current backlog and remove items that no longer work (15 minutes)
• Re-prioritize items based on your project goals (20 minutes)
• Introduce new items to add to the backlog (15 minutes)
• Discuss the next steps and actions from the meeting (5 minutes)

Within that structure, here are a few things you need to ensure you’ve covered so that nothing important is missed. Tick them off one by one once they’ve been discussed.  

Checklist Item	Complete?
Have you ensured all items in your backlog align with your long-term product roadmap?	Yes/No
Are your items refined by breaking them down into smaller tasks to facilitate better understanding?	Yes/No
Have you estimated the effort needed to complete a backlog item? If it requires too much effort for little value, remove it.	Yes/No
Have you managed the dependencies of your items? This may impact the order of prioritization.	Yes/No
Have you assessed the risks involved with the backlog items? If an item is too risky, remove it from the backlog.	Yes/No
Have you scheduled recurring meetings for continuous review?	Yes/No
Are important decisions, changes, and details made during the meeting well-documented for future reference?	Yes/No
Have you considered stakeholder feedback when refining your backlog to ensure items align with needs and expectations?	Yes/No

Is backlog refinement the same as sprint planning?

No. Don’t confuse backlog refinement with sprint planning. It’s understandable why so many get their wires crossed, but these two practices are distinct. 

Remember, in a backlog refinement meeting, you review the items to see if they’re still relevant, detailed enough, and correctly prioritized. You are combing through your backlog to improve its quality. 

Sprint planning is the process of figuring out what your team will work on over the next sprint cycle. In that planning session, you may decide to move items from your product backlog to your spirit backlog. In fact, this is why backlog refinement is important, as it helps the sprint planning meeting.

Try to avoid your backlog refinement meeting from turning into sprint planning. This just cuts corners. Although it may be tempting, the goals for each are different and you’ll need a few different folks to be there.

Yes, backlog refinement can feed into sprint planning, but it’s better to draw a clear distinction between the two. If your refinement session turns into a mini-sprint plan, it can lead to key decisions being made without fully considering the sprint goal or team capacity. 

Backlog refinement meeting best practices

So now you know how to run a backlog refinement meeting. Cool! But you don’t just want to host any run-of-the-mill backlog meeting, do you? 

Of course not. You want to run the best god-damn refinement meeting your company has ever seen. To do that, follow these tips to get the most out of the session. 

• Keep the backlog DEEP. The DEEP acronym, coined by Mike Cohn and Roman Pichler, helps Product Managers structure their backlog to make it more useful. By following DEEP, you want to keep all your items detailed; change, add, or remove items based on new insights to keep them emergent; ensure everything is estimated by giving items a timeline; and prioritize your items by placing high-value items at the top of the list. 
• Use a definition of ready (DoR). Each item should have an agreed-upon criteria to indicate when a product backlog item is ready to move into the development backlog. Having this criteria shows the team what the work will entail.
• Don’t ever delete items. The backlog refinement meeting is all about cleaning up your backlog and removing items that may not be worth exploring. Although you want these gone from the backlog, you should never delete them entirely. Instead, record why these potential solutions aren’t going to be explored further an archive them. Having these reasons effectively explains to the wider team why certain items have been changed or removed. Also, you never know when that same idea will come up again – you don’t want to have to go through the same decision-making process again!
• Separate product items into chunks. You want your backlog items to be manageable. If an item takes more than half a sprint to complete, it may negatively affect the team’s productivity. Split these items into smaller tasks to make them easier to work on. You can do this during your refinement meeting to ensure the items are feasible. 

Do you HAVE to run a backlog refinement meeting?

Full disclosure, our team at ProdPad doesn’t run backlog refinement meetings – but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. 

In our experience, we’ve found that hosting a regular meeting ate away valuable time from our internal stakeholders. Instead, we’ve iterated on the traditional backlog refinement meeting, running tighter ‘check-ups’ to sense-check the continuous refinement efforts we do to our backlogs. 

That works for us and you need to do what works for you.

Whether or not you run backlog refinement meetings boils down to a few factors, such as your overall team size, workflow methodology, and structure. Ultimately, you want all the meetings you hold to add value and serve a purpose. Don’t be scared to move away from backlog refinement meetings if you find they’re just not doing it for you. 

Ace your next backlog refinement meeting

Hopefully, you agree that the backlog refinement meeting can be a powerful tool – but only if you get it right and if it works for you! It’s a great way to cultivate a real team culture and tidy up your backlog at the same time. 

We’ve laid out all you could possibly need to know about the backlog refinement meeting to help you step up your game and get more out of these useful, yet admittedly tricky meetings. 

At ProdPad, we’re pretty keen on keeping your product backlog and development backlog tidy and separate from each other. It just keeps things well organized and produces better results. Hosting regular backlog refinement meetings helps the movement of items from one backlog to another.  

We’re so obsessed with this that we’ve designed the ProdPad tool to help you manage these two backlogs effectively. Have a go for yourself with our free trial to see how it feels for you.