What is backlog refinement in agile and scrum? [2025 guide]

Shipping software faster is the goal, but what happens when speed overtakes clarity? Teams end up with rework, missed deadlines, and features that don’t hit the mark. The real challenge in development is delivering the right work, at the right pace, without creating friction.

This is where consistent backlog refinement becomes a team’s most valuable practice. It is the ongoing process of turning big ideas into clear, ready-to-build work items. By preparing work before a sprint begins, teams create shared understanding and reduce the uncertainty that stalls progress.

This guide walks through how to build a strong refinement habit. We will explore key activities, best practices for productive sessions, and how to solve common challenges. You will learn how to make your development process faster, more aligned, and more predictable.

Key takeaways

• Regular backlog refinement makes sprint planning 3x faster by preparing clear, estimated work items before your team commits to delivery.
• Involve your whole development team in refinement sessions to catch technical issues early and build shared understanding across all roles.
• Spend about 10% of your sprint time on refinement activities to maintain a healthy backlog without overwhelming your development capacity.
• Focus refinement on the next 2–3 sprints’ worth of work to balance preparation with changing business priorities.
• Tools like monday dev can help teams track refinement progress with customizable workflows.

What is backlog refinement in agile and scrum?

Backlog refinement is the ongoing process where product owners and development teams collaborate to review, prioritize, estimate, and clarify product backlog items before they enter sprint planning. This means teams work together to transform vague ideas into clear, actionable work items that everyone understands.

Think of refinement as preparation work that happens continuously throughout your sprints. You’re breaking down big features into smaller pieces, adding acceptance criteria, and making sure everyone knows what needs to be built and why. Items become ready for the sprint backlog.

Understanding product backlog refinement

A product backlog is your ordered list of features, enhancements, and fixes waiting to be developed. Refinement is the collaborative activity that makes these items ready for sprint planning.

During refinement, you’ll focus on several key activities that prepare your backlog items:

• Review and prioritization: Examining items for business value and urgency
• Estimation and sizing: Determining effort using story points or similar methods
• Clarification and decomposition: Breaking large items into manageable pieces
• Acceptance criteria definition: Establishing clear completion requirements

The purpose of refinement in scrum

Refinement bridges the gap between product vision and executable work. It follows the three pillars of Scrum. While it’s not an official Scrum ceremony, successful teams treat it as essential for smooth sprint planning.

When you invest in refinement, your sprint planning sessions become focused discussions about commitment rather than lengthy debates about requirements. This preparation ensures your team can confidently select and commit to work they understand. A sprint review demonstrates completed work.

Key activities during backlog refinement

Refinement sessions involve specific activities that transform rough ideas into sprint-ready work items. Each activity serves a purpose in creating shared understanding and reducing uncertainty.

To create shared understanding and reduce uncertainty, your sessions should include these core activities:

• Story breakdown: Decomposing epics into sprint-sized work items
• Acceptance criteria definition: Creating clear success metrics
• Effort estimation: Using relative sizing techniques
• Dependency identification: Mapping relationships and blockers
• Priority alignment: Ensuring items reflect current business value

Backlog grooming vs backlog refinement

Both terms describe the same activity: reviewing and preparing backlog items so they’re clear, prioritized, and ready for development. Over time, “refinement” has become the preferred term because “grooming” carries negative associations and doesn’t reflect how the practice has evolved.

Why agile teams moved away from grooming

The shift from “grooming” to “refinement” reflects a deeper understanding of the activity’s purpose. The term “refinement” more accurately captures the collaborative, value-adding nature of preparing backlog items for development.

What stays consistent between both terms

Whether called grooming or refinement, the essential activities remain the same: breaking down larger items, adding estimates, defining acceptance criteria, and building shared understanding across the team.

Backlog refinement vs sprint planning

Backlog refinement and sprint planning often get confused, but they serve different purposes in your agile process.

Backlog refinement is an ongoing activity. It’s where the team reviews, prioritizes, and estimates upcoming items to make sure they’re clear and ready. Participation is flexible, and sessions can involve whoever is needed to clarify the work.

Sprint planning is a time-boxed ceremony that happens at the start of each sprint. The whole Scrum team comes together to commit to a set of backlog items. It’s about turning the refined “what” into a concrete “how” and “when.”

Timing and purpose distinctions

Refinement happens throughout the sprint, keeping your backlog in good shape for what’s ahead. Planning happens once, at the beginning of the sprint, to decide what the team will commit to delivering.

Think of refinement as preparing the work and planning as locking in the sprint commitment.

How both ceremonies support each other

Refinement and planning work best when they complement one another. A well-refined backlog makes sprint planning shorter and more effective. Instead of long debates about requirements, the team can focus on capacity, commitment, and alignment.

Why development teams need regular refinement

Regular refinement transforms how your team delivers software. Instead of rushing through unclear requirements, you’ll work with confidence and predictability.

Faster sprint planning sessions

When backlog items are properly refined, sprint planning becomes a focused discussion about team capacity and commitment. You’ll spend minutes selecting work rather than hours debating requirements.

This efficiency comes from having clear acceptance criteria, understood dependencies, and agreed-upon estimates before planning begins. monday dev helps teams track refinement progress with customizable workflows that ensure items meet your “definition of ready.”

Improved team alignment and understanding

Refinement creates shared understanding before development starts. When everyone participates in breaking down stories and defining success criteria, you eliminate the miscommunication that leads to rework, further reinforced by agile retrospectives.

Cross-functional participation ensures all perspectives are considered early, helping to close what research identifies as a 16-point perception gap between senior leaders and individual contributors on whether shared ownership is truly fostered. Developers identify technical challenges, testers clarify acceptance criteria, and designers highlight user experience considerations.

Enhanced delivery predictability

Teams with mature refinement practices forecast more accurately. You’re comparing similar-sized items across sprints rather than mixing well-defined work with vague requirements.

This predictability supports executive decision-making and helps organizations plan releases with confidence, thereby improving engineering productivity at scale. Stakeholders can trust your delivery commitments because they’re based on well-understood work.

Who participates in backlog refinement sessions?

Effective refinement requires the right mix of perspectives. While specific participants vary, certain roles are essential for productive sessions.

Essential team members

• Product owner: Provides business context and makes prioritization decisions
• Development team members: Offer technical insights and effort estimates
• Scrum master: Facilitates discussions and keeps sessions focused

When to include stakeholders

Include subject matter experts or business stakeholders when their expertise directly impacts understanding. For complex features, early stakeholder involvement prevents costly misunderstandings. Large organizations might adopt Scrum of scrums.

Keep stakeholder participation purposeful. Too many participants slow decision-making and reduce session effectiveness.

Managing remote participation

Distributed teams need platforms that support real-time collaboration. With monday dev, distributed teams can run seamless remote refinement sessions using shared boards, real-time updates, and integrated communication features.

How to conduct productive backlog refinement

Successful refinement balances structure with flexibility. You need a consistent process that adapts to item complexity and team needs.

Creating your refinement meeting agenda

A structured agenda keeps sessions focused while allowing for collaborative discussion. Most teams benefit from this format:

• Review previous session outcomes (5 minutes)
• Prioritize items for discussion (10 minutes)
• Refine selected items (30-40 minutes)
• Confirm next session focus (5 minutes)

Step 1: Prioritize backlog items by value

Start by identifying which items need attention based on business value and upcoming sprint needs. Focus on items likely to be selected for the next 2-3 sprints.

Consider each item’s customer impact, strategic alignment, and technical dependencies.

Step 2: Decompose large user stories

Break epics into sprint-sized items that deliver user value. Each piece should be small enough to complete in one sprint but large enough to provide meaningful functionality.

Look for natural breakpoints like user workflows or system boundaries. Avoid creating items so small they lose business meaning.

Step 3: Estimate story points together

Use relative estimation to size items based on complexity and uncertainty. Team consensus matters more than precision—you’re building shared understanding, not predicting exact hours.

Planning poker, t-shirt sizing, or simple comparison all work well. Choose the method your team finds most engaging.

Step 4: Define clear acceptance criteria

Create specific, testable criteria that define “done.” Good acceptance criteria eliminate ambiguity and prevent scope creep during development, which is critical when research shows that employees who understand how success is measured are 2x more likely to feel motivated.

Focus on outcomes rather than implementation details. Answer: “How will we know this works correctly?”

Step 5: Map dependencies and risks

Identify relationships between items and external dependencies. Document these connections to enable realistic sprint planning.

Consider technical dependencies, third-party integrations, and business decisions that could impact delivery.

7 best practices for agile backlog refinement

Adopting proven practices helps teams maximize their refinement investment while avoiding common pitfalls. Following these guidelines will help you build a sustainable habit that keeps your backlog healthy and your team aligned.

1. Schedule regular refinement cadences

Consistent scheduling ensures your backlog stays current. Most teams benefit from weekly or bi-weekly sessions, adjusted for sprint length and backlog volatility. Regular cadences help team members prepare and prevent refinement from being pushed aside by urgent work.

2. Use relative estimation techniques

For refinement, relative estimation methods (like story points or t-shirt sizing) help teams compare items and forecast more effectively. For detailed guidance on estimation approaches, see the “Key activities during backlog refinement” section.

3. Keep sessions focused and time-boxed

Set clear time limits and stick to your agenda. When discussions become too detailed, capture notes for follow-up rather than derailing the session. Most items can be refined in 10–15 minutes of focused discussion.

4. Involve the whole team

Encourage participation from all team members. Quieter members often have valuable insights when specifically invited to contribute. Cross-functional participation ensures technical, business, and user experience considerations are all represented.

5. Track refinement metrics

Monitor indicators that show refinement effectiveness:

• Sprint readiness: Percentage of sprint items properly refined
• Planning efficiency: Time spent in sprint planning
• Scope stability: Frequency of mid-sprint changes

6. Balance features with technical work

Include technical debt and infrastructure improvements alongside user features. Technical work should be prioritized and sized like any other backlog item to ensure it’s visible and planned effectively.

7. Prepare items before sessions

Product owners should provide initial business context and draft acceptance criteria ahead of time. This preparation maximizes collaborative refinement time and ensures sessions stay focused.

Solving common refinement challenges

Even experienced teams face refinement challenges. Understanding these issues helps maintain productive practices as your team evolves.

Managing oversized product backlogs

Large backlogs overwhelm refinement efforts. Regular pruning removes outdated items and keeps sessions focused on current priorities. Use backlog management tools for easier prioritization.

Implement quarterly backlog reviews to remove items that no longer align with product strategy. Use themes or hierarchies to organize large backlogs into manageable chunks.

Handling ambiguous requirements

Unclear requirements make refinement frustrating. Establish clear processes for requirement clarification before refinement sessions.

Create templates that help product owners prepare items with sufficient detail. When requirements remain unclear, use research spikes to gather needed information.

Scaling refinement across teams

Multiple teams working from shared backlogs need coordination mechanisms. Establish ownership boundaries and communication protocols between teams.

monday dev provides portfolio-level visibility to coordinate refinement across teams while maintaining autonomy in specific practices.

Transform your backlog refinement with monday dev

Refinement becomes easier when teams have the right tools in place. The monday dev platform is designed to remove common blockers and streamline refinement with features that support every stage of the process.

AI-powered story prioritization

Prioritization doesn’t need to eat up hours of debate. With AI assistance, backlog items can be quickly evaluated based on business impact, technical dependencies, and past velocity patterns. This gives teams a clear view of what to refine first, reducing manual sorting and ensuring effort goes toward the work that matters most.

Customizable refinement workflows

Every team approaches refinement differently. Flexible workflows make it simple to track each item’s journey from “Needs Breakdown” to “Sprint Ready.” Automations notify stakeholders when clarification is needed, while dynamic forms enforce your team’s definition of ready. This ensures stories meet quality standards before sprint planning begins, without adding extra overhead.

Real-time cross-team collaboration

Refinement requires input from multiple roles, and collaboration should feel seamless. Shared boards allow team members to update acceptance criteria, add technical notes, and adjust estimates together in real time. Integrated comments and @mentions keep discussions in context, while distributed teams can connect instantly through built-in video conferencing — no need to switch between tools.

Portfolio-level backlog visibility

When several teams work in parallel, leaders need a clear view of progress and dependencies. Portfolio dashboards provide insight into what’s ready, what’s blocked, and where coordination is required. This visibility helps managers anticipate risks, allocate resources, and keep delivery predictable at scale.

Consistent backlog refinement is the foundation of predictable, high-quality delivery. By pairing agile practices with the right workflows, your team can reduce friction, align more effectively, and plan with confidence. With tools that prioritize clarity, collaboration, and visibility, refinement becomes less of a chore and more of a competitive advantage.