Product Backlog Refinement: What NOT to do

Building a shared understanding with the Scrum Team is vital to produce meaningful products. Yet, it's easy for Product Owners to fall into multiple traps and have meaningless Product Backlog Refinements: What should you NOT do during the refinement sessions?
- Don't plan solutions
- Don't focus on the estimates
- Don't pressure developers to discuss what they don't know
- Don't fall into endless technical discussions
- Don't bring irrelevant Product Backlog Items

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[LeandroR]

4 months into a PM role. I am still 'taking the horse by the reins', and this video seems useful. Thanks!

[shansm-ewef]

David, really loved how you explained refinement. Thank you!

[SammySamer]

Absolutely loved the video! First time laughing in such an informative video, honestly, kudos to you, good man! I've got an interview revolving around a Product Backlog Refinement session, and this video alone cleared up a lot of info. Thank you for the knowledge and congratulations on this new sub :D

[legehjons]

Thanks so much for such an explicit feedback on this topic sir.

[PJHMX]

I learned many things and gained insights from your experience. Thanks for sharing David !

[jammer]

David, outstanding video, thank you for the excellent content and entertaining and supporting presentation! I have seen all too frequently that teams can mistake their overall mission as the problem for which they are attempting to define a solution. Rather, to your point, I prefer to see teams understand the customer needs, understand their pain points, and define a set of problem statements which can be brought to the team for them to find a solution. The other thing I see lacking from many teams are a solid set of requirements which would be the output of a solution session, and aimed at satisfying the solution.

I would love to hear more from you on your perspectives of product roadmaps, defining user journeys, and how you have performed usability testing.

[nicorago]

Thank you David for your video! Please, I would like to understand the part where you say we must show the problem and not the solution in the refinement meeting. In our product team, we usually use the Refinement Meeting to explain to the team what needs to be built (previously we had a meeting between the Product Manager, Product Designer, and the Tech Lead to find out the best solution to the problem). But, what would it look like to have a refinement meeting with user problems and needs (opportunities) and how would be possible to put product backlog items in the sprint if we are just talking about problems in the refinement? There won't be time to better define the solution if we do so. Please, help me understand that.

[ivanrodrigues]

David, great video. I am a QA and participated of refiniment meeting. Thank you very much!

[MrRobotoDomo]

this video needs to be in the front page of jira hahah

[karlgustav]

“Developers don’t want to implement the (a?) solution, they want to solve problems” ? Then what is their job? I could say “UX designers don’t want to do research prototyping or user testing, just fancy UI ideas” It is a developer’s job to help assist in solving users problems as part of a Team. His skillset is to actually build a bug free, stable and scalable software solution. And it certainly helps having domain knowledge and empathy for actual users of the software to make good decisions . But to think that developers just by themselves can solve problems that come from a different domain (business, UX) is just … sorry to be blunt: overestimating their Skillset.