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Let's talk about the backlog refinement process, once known as backlog grooming. You might know the Pareto principle and the philosophy of doing 80% of the work with 20% effort. It sounds wonderful, right?

On the other hand, refining a product backlog, updating backlog items and estimates might seem like a luxurious activity one postpones until they’re free from other activities in the agile process.

However, that’s not the case. Refining the backlog is indispensable. Sometimes, the power lies in the details, and with backlog management, that couldn't be truer.

Backlog refinement resembles great chefs developing their new recipes. 🍳 That's because besides details, refining a backlog demands a great deal of filling in the gaps and adjusting.

Join us as we discuss what refining a backlog entails. We'll look at what it is, its importance, the details of how to do it, and some key tips.

First things first, let’s look at what backlog refinement is.

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About backlog refinement

Backlog refinement is like pruning a plant: You discard the branches that are no longer necessary so you can help the plant grow the right way.

That means that you already have items in your backlog, but they might need some information or an update before they’re implemented. Also, some items might even need to be cut off from the backlog.

Refining the backlog saves time and money by ensuring that its items are ready for development at the right time. It also ensures that no customer-valuable item is forgotten. On the other hand, it guarantees that only customer-valuable items are implemented. All of this helps you retain customer focus.

Pick up your pruning shears, because we’re about to help you trim your backlog. ✂️

The Product Owner most likely schedules work sessions to refine the backlog.

These backlog refinement sessions should be regular, though you can refine the backlog more informally as long as it's an ongoing process. Besides the Product Owner, some of the Scrum team members can participate. Remember that the Development Team, the Scrum Master, and Product Owner are the Scrum Team. Although the Product Owner can update the backlog themselves, it's a great practice to involve the team.

Besides keeping the backlog up-to-date and complete, backlog refinement involves:

• Splitting broad user stories or other types of backlog items such as tasks or bugs, plus adding detail to them to improve comprehension
• Adding or reviewing estimates to issues, as estimation is crucial to sprint planning
• Ordering backlog issues to deliver high-priority ones in the next Scrum iteration

Important: Keep in mind that the customer ultimately determines the priorities. That’s one of the reasons why backlog refinement should be customer-centric (more on that later).

Tools that help you keep your backlog customer-centric will also help you deliver better for your customers. Easy Agile TeamRhythm lets you view your backlog and sprints in the context of the user story map, so you the whole team can see at a glance the work that is most important to your users.

Now that you know what refining a backlog is and who’s involved, let’s cover how to do it.

How to refine a backlog

There are so many ways of refining a backlog that it would be impossible to give you the best one.

• You could refine — split and detail — first and estimate second, starting with the least understood items first.
• You could estimate first to conclude on items that demand refinement before estimation and only then refine high-effort items if necessary.
• You could use a dedicated tool to help you refine or estimate, such as Easy Agile TeamRhythm, or you could just rely on a spreadsheet or a whiteboard and pen.

When refining the backlog, the Product Owner and the involved team members pursue the following goals:

• Make sure the backlog is accurate, which means that it contains all the necessary items.
• Maintain the prioritization of those items.

Ensure the delivery of the most important items, which should be on top of the backlog.

In the course of refinement, those involved might need to revive the product vision and the product roadmap. It might also be helpful to create user personas and define acceptance criteria, especially for item detailing.

Do you know what a backlog item ready for a sprint looks like? If not, develop a definition of done as well as a definition of ready. Then, to achieve item readiness, work out items such as:

• Sharing an understanding of the acceptance criteria
• Agreeing on a structure for the full description of different kinds of item
• Defining a clear view of dependencies between items
• Identifying the subject matter expert for each item

Finally, you should refine high-priority items first. Those are the ones developers will implement first in the next sprint.

Remember that backlog refinement is the set of all activities that have to do with managing backlog items. But there’s a thing: Backlog refinement doesn't have a time-box. According to the Scrum framework, it's not one of the Scrum events. Instead, it's a continuous crusade, and it's not necessarily a meeting (although it can be).

As you get used to backlog refinement, you can use the following questions to evaluate your progress.

Backlog refinement checklist

While goals are nice to have, you need to carry out specific actions to achieve them. So, here's a checklist that you must regularly go through. You can use it to either evaluate if the backlog needs refinement or confirm that refinement is done for the moment.

• Does the backlog contain user stories or other kinds of items that no longer make sense?
• Did you elicit any user need that's not yet in an appropriate form of backlog item?
• Does your customer expect you to implement any urgent item that's at the bottom of the backlog?
• Did the importance of delivering any item change since the last time you looked at the backlog?
• Does the backlog have any item for which no agile estimate exists?
• Is any estimate outdated?
• Is any backlog item too broad to understand what developers should implement in the next sprint?

You can only claim to have a refined backlog when you answer "No" to all the above questions. Until then, keep working on it, and avoid the below traps.

WATCH: Eliminate your flat backlog

What to avoid with backlog refinement

1. Ask more experienced team members to detail backlog items or provide estimates. For instance, junior developers aren't well-equipped to do this — talk with more senior team members about these topics.

2. Involve select team members. Talking with the entire team tends to just add noise. And, as we mentioned above, you should try to involve more experienced team members rather than more junior people.

3. Document your decisions.  This is terribly important. Human memory is unreliable. So, to repeat good decisions and avoid bad ones, document both over time.

4. Do not excessively detail backlog items. Or you risk developers not knowing what to do with them. A great way to avoid this is involving some members of the Development Team in backlog refinement.

5. You shouldn't refine backlog items currently under development. You should refine the backlog for the next sprint or subsequent sprints.

6. Don't refine the backlog of the current sprint until it ends. You might feel tempted to only refine backlog items until the very last minute. That isn't good. Unexpected things happen, such as busy agendas, and discussions that take longer than anticipated...as a result, you might not deliver what's expected.

7. Avoid disagreements on estimates.  That's usually a sign that refinement is lacking for that item. Listen to those people who suggest the highest or the lowest estimates. They're usually the ones who didn't understand the items because of either missing or too much information.

8. Get multiple people to weigh in on estimates.  Although only asking one person may speed up the estimation, that doesn’t demonstrate a shared understanding. And that's something you should be keen about in backlog refinement.

If you’re unsure whether you need to do this process, take a look at the below benefits.

Best practices for maintaining a DEEP backlog

A truly effective backlog follows the DEEP principles - Detailed appropriately, Estimated, Emergent, and Prioritized. Here's how to operationalize these principles in your daily backlog management:

Detailed appropriately

• Progressive elaboration system: Implement a tiered detailing approach where items receive increasing levels of detail as they move up the backlog:
  • Tier 1 (Top of backlog): Fully detailed with acceptance criteria, mock-ups, and technical notes
  • Tier 2 (Next 2-3 sprints): Basic acceptance criteria and initial technical assessment
  • Tier 3 (Further out): Minimal detail, just enough to understand scope and purpose
• Detail-level checklist: Create a standardized "detail sufficiency" checklist for each backlog item priority level:

High-Priority Item Checklist:
☐ Acceptance criteria defined
☐ UI/UX considerations documented
☐ Dependencies identified
☐ Technical approach outlined
☐ Testing requirements specified

• Just-in-time detailing sessions: Schedule 30-minute sessions dedicated solely to detailing specific high-priority items that are approaching implementation, focusing on one item at a time rather than trying to detail everything at once.

Estimated

• Estimation calibration workshop: Hold a quarterly calibration session where the team re-estimates a few completed items to check if their estimation accuracy is improving or needs adjustment.
• Confidence rating system: Alongside each estimate, include a confidence rating (High/Medium/Low) to flag items that might need re-estimation closer to implementation.
• Reference story library: Maintain a small set of reference stories with known estimates that new team members can use to calibrate their understanding of story points or other estimation units.
• Rotational estimation lead: Assign a rotating role of "Estimation Lead" who prepares estimation materials and facilitates discussion for complex items before the refinement session.

Emergent

• Backlog evolution timeline: Create a visual timeline showing how major themes in your backlog have evolved, helping stakeholders understand the natural emergence of priorities over time.
• Split/merge tracking: Track items that are frequently split or merged to identify patterns that might indicate improper scope definition or changing understanding.
• Innovation time box: Reserve 10% of each refinement session to discuss potential new backlog items based on recent customer feedback, market changes, or technical discoveries.
• Pruning protocol: Establish a clear protocol for archiving or removing backlog items that haven't moved in 3-6 months, requiring explicit justification to keep items that remain stagnant.

Prioritized

• Multi-factor prioritization framework: Create a simple scoring system that considers business value, customer impact, technical risk, and strategic alignment when prioritizing items.
• Priority horizon planning: Define clear "priority horizons" where items are grouped by implementation timeframe (Now, Next, Later, Future) rather than trying to maintain a perfectly ordered list of 100+ items.
• Stakeholder priority alignment check: Conduct a monthly alignment check where key stakeholders review the top 10-15 backlog items to ensure prioritization still reflects current business needs.
• Urgency vs. importance matrix: Use a 2x2 matrix to visually map items based on urgency and importance, helping distinguish truly high-priority items from merely urgent ones.

The value of refining your backlog

Backlog refinement can save you time and money. Back in the old days, someone would basically engrave a requirement specification document in stone before development. With the rise of agile, that's ancient history.

A backlog contributes massively to the success of an agile project. It’s a living document, which means it changes over time. But while it changes, it must remain accurate. And there are no strict rules when it comes to refining a backlog. That means, for instance, that not every item requires detail.

However, the Product Owner should guarantee that the backlog items are ready for scheduling. 📅 And without backlog refinement, that would be a Herculean task.

Imagine meeting a sprint goal without:

• Enough information about backlog items or items with heavy, complex descriptions
• Outdated estimates or no estimates at all
• High-priority items forgotten at the tail of the backlog
• Items that reside only in people's heads or no longer represent value to the customer

Here’s what you would face:

• Crazy development calendars
• Undelivered items
• Items delivered late
• Insane budgets

That wouldn't definitely be a good prognostic for customer retention.

Bridging customer-centricity with your backlog structure

While most teams claim to be customer-centric, truly embedding customer needs into the fabric of your backlog requires systematic approaches:

Persona-driven backlog organization

Create a backlog structure that explicitly connects items to customer personas and journeys:

• Persona tagging system: Implement tags or custom fields in your backlog tool that associate each item with specific user personas (e.g., "Power User Sarah" or "New Customer Alex").
• Customer journey alignment: Map backlog items to specific stages in the customer journey, ensuring you're addressing needs across the entire experience.
• Persona-based filtering: Set up backlog views filtered by persona to periodically check if you're neglecting certain user types.

Voice-of-Customer integration practices

Establish regular rhythms to incorporate customer feedback directly into backlog management:

• Customer insight review: Schedule a monthly session where customer support logs, user research, and analytics are reviewed specifically to identify potential backlog additions or reprioritizations.
• Outcome-based grouping: Group backlog items by customer outcomes rather than features, helping the team focus on what customers want to achieve rather than specific implementations.
• Customer verification points: Mark specific high-impact backlog items for direct customer verification before implementation, creating a feedback loop that validates your understanding.

Customer value assessment framework

Implement a lightweight framework to assess customer value:

Customer Value Scale (1-5):
1: Nice to have, minimal user impact
2: Solves minor pain points for some users
3: Notable improvement for many users
4: Significant value add for core users
5: Game-changing capability for majority of users

Balancing detail: How to avoid over-refinement and under-refinement

Finding the right level of detail is crucial for efficient backlog management - it is a delicate balancing act, but with the right frameworks in place, you should be able to easily find your footing. Here are some ideas:

The "Just-Right" detailing framework

Implement a visual system in your backlog tool to indicate detail status:

• Red: Under-refined, needs substantial work before sprint planning
• Yellow: Partially refined, key questions remain
• Green: Appropriately detailed for its current priority

Detail radar chart

For complex items, use a simple radar chart to assess completeness across different detail dimensions:

• Functional requirements
• Technical considerations
• Edge cases/exceptions
• UX/UI specifics
• Testing approach

Time-boxed refinement protocol

Establish time limits based on item size:

• Small items: Max 15 minutes of refinement time
• Medium items: Max 30 minutes
• Large items: Max 60 minutes (or consider splitting)

If an item can't be sufficiently refined within these timeboxes, it's a signal that either the item is too large or fundamental understanding is missing.

Progressive detail thresholds

Define clear thresholds for when to increase detail:

• When an item moves into the "Next 2 Sprints" zone: Ensure all acceptance criteria are defined
• When an item moves into the "Next Sprint Candidates" zone: Add technical approach and testing strategy
• When an item is selected for upcoming sprint: Final detail check with implementation team

Documenting backlog decisions for traceability

Finally, create a system that preserves the context and reasoning behind backlog decisions.

Decision log integration

Maintain a lightweight decision log directly linked to backlog changes. It would look something like this:

‍Backlog Decision Log

Date: [Date]
Item: [Item ID/Name]
Decision: [Prioritization change, scope modification, etc.]
Rationale: [Business context, customer feedback, technical constraints]
Stakeholders: [Who was involved in or informed of the decision]
Impact: [What other items or timelines are affected]

Backlog item history annotations

Use comments or a history section in each backlog item to document significant changes.

• Priority changes (and why)
• Scope modifications
• Estimation adjustments
• Dependencies discovered

Backlog review snapshots

Take periodic "snapshots" of your backlog's top 20 items and save them with dates, to give you the historical context on how priorities have evolved.

Transition criteria documentation

Explicitly document the criteria that moved an item from one state to another.

• Why was this item pulled into the sprint?
• Why was this item deprioritized?
• Why did the estimate change significantly?

Regular backlog health audits

Implement a systematic approach to maintaining backlog health over time.

Monthly backlog health checklist

Date: [Date]
Auditor(s): [Names]

Items Review
- [ ] Items older than 6 months reviewed and updated/archived
- [ ] No orphaned items (all connected to epics/themes)
- [ ] All high-priority items have sufficient detail
- [ ] Acceptance criteria consistent across similar items

Metrics Review
- Backlog growth rate: [%]
- Item completion rate: [%]
- Average time in backlog: [Days]
- Estimation accuracy: [%]

Balance Review
- Technical debt vs. feature work balance: [Ratio]
- Distribution across strategic themes: [Analysis]
- Distribution across customer personas: [Analysis]

Action Items
1. [Action]
2. [Action]
3. [Action]

Backlog vitality score

You can even create a simple scoring system (0-100) for backlog health based on factors like:

• Freshness (when items were last updated)
• Detail quality
• Prioritization clarity
• Strategic alignment
• Technical debt balance

Track this score over time to identify trends.

Staleness detection automation

Set up automated flagging for potentially stale backlog items.

• No activity in 90+ days
• No recent changes despite being high priority
• Estimates or technical approaches that predate major system changes

Backlog refinement is an essential process

If you think of space missions and compare them to backlog refinement, the backlog is your mission guide. 🚀 And unless you have a refined backlog, your mission guide will get you no farther than your backyard. 😨

Backlog refinement should help you in your quest to have a permanently relevant set of items in your backlog. And by relevant, we mean complete, valuable, detailed yet straightforward, recently estimated, and correctly ordered.

While it’s VERY easy to forget about the importance of backlog refinement, don't. Focusing on the current sprint is essential, but delivering a satisfactory product is the most important thing. And an appropriately refined backlog helps team spirits.

Additionally, you don't want to be that Product Owner who gets a bucket full of questions during a sprint planning meeting. That's a strong indication that backlog refinement failed epically.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm can help you refine user stories by enabling you to:

• Register estimation in user stories
• Drag and drop user stories to prioritize by customer value and business value

Try out these tips during backlog refinement. We’re sure you’ll love it, and if you need a hand, we’re here and happy to help.

Planning is a critical phase of the agile process; it's an opportunity to align on priorities as team and organize work in a sequence that will help it run smoothly. The planning process helps agile software development and other product development teams sort through new information, adapt to dependencies, and address evolving customer needs.

Agile is the opposite of traditional waterfall project planning, which takes a step-by-step approach. Waterfall has dominated project planning for many years, with detailed plans laid out at the beginning of a project that had to be adhered to rigidly. This may move a project or product forward, but it neglects to account for any new developments that could occur outside of the “master plan.”

Agile is an iterative process that helps teams reduce waste and maximize efficiency for the ultimate goal of bringing value to customers. This customer-first approach helps teams make informed choices throughout the development process — choices that continually and consistently provide value to stakeholders.

One of the greatest advantages of an iterative agile approach is that it enables early feedback from stakeholders. You don’t need to guess whether or not you’re making the right decisions — you can find out every step of the way by directly including stakeholders in your process. You can adapt your plan as you need to based on what will provide the most value to customers at any time.

Even if you are part of a seasoned agile team, there are always opportunities for improvement and processes to fine-tune. This post will outline some unproductive agile planning mistakes teams make, including how agile teams can avoid these common pitfalls.

Agile Planning Mistake #1: Not being on the same page as stakeholders

Do you involve stakeholders in your planning process? Do they understand your goals and why you are making each decision? Working directly with stakeholders, both internal stakeholders and the users of your product, will help you gain a clear view of both needs and constraints, and give you the information you need to determine what should be done when.

It's never a good idea to rest on assumptions. Your stakeholders live in a different world than the one you are deeply embedded in, with different priorities and assumptions of their own. So that you can produce deliverables that meet stakeholder expectations, you need to agree on what those expectations are. Involve your stakeholders in planning, but ensure everyone understands that expectations could evolve throughout the process based on new information gained from successes, failures, and customer responses.

Agile Planning Mistake #2: Not accounting for dependencies

Failing to account for dependencies in agile planning leads to bottlenecks, delayed releases, and undermines team collaboration. Collaboration within and across teams is needed for a business to deliver effectively. When multiple teams are working on interconnected features, if one team’s progress is blocked by another, the entire development cycle slows down. Without clear visibility of dependencies, work can be delayed and deadlines missed.

To minimize and avoid disruption to the flow of work, take the time to consult with stakeholders and anticipate dependencies early. Tools that help you visualise and map dependencies, and shared roadmaps to track cross-team dependencies, allow you to share an understanding of dependencies and sequence work in a way that avoids roadblocks. Proactively managing dependencies ensures smoother iterations, faster time-to-market, and a more predictable agile process.

Agile Planning Mistake #3: Using bland, flat product maps

Flat product backlogs are bland and boring 😴. Think carrot cake without icing. They lack the detail and functionality needed to realize the full story of your product backlog.

Plus, once you have more than a handful of items, they become overwhelming and difficult to organize in a meaningful way. It becomes less clear which item is the most important and more difficult to ensure your decisions align with the larger goal of the project.

When you plan out your roadmap, it needs context, and you must be able to clearly see the customer journey. User story maps visualize the customer journey in the planning process and throughout the entire process of product development. They utilize user stories — the smallest unit of work that can bring value to the customer — so you can plan and organize the backlog from the customer’s perspective.

📕 Read our ultimate guide to user story maps to learn more.

Agile Planning Mistake #4: Not allowing the plan to live, breathe, and adapt

As we've already discussed, agile is an iterative approach. This means your agile planning needs to leave room for changes. Your plan should be able to grow and adapt as you progress with each sprint or product roadmap.

At the beginning of a sprint, you lack the information needed to see the full picture. You don’t have everything you need to build the perfect solution, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the process. Spending hours or days trying to iron out the perfect plan just wastes time that could be better spent learning and solving problems as they come. What you thought would provide the most value during the planning phase could be completely different down the track.

You may need to alter your plan after a roadblock comes up in a daily stand-up, or you may learn about a customer concern that completely changes your direction. Iterations are inevitable and welcomed! They help you keep pace with incoming information as you learn from each other, stakeholders, and your customers.

Agile planning isn’t a promise. It’s an outline that will help you reach your goal, and that changes with your goals and circumstances.

Agile Planning Mistake #5: Not incorporating retrospective insights in the following planning session

Retrospectives are an essential piece of the agile process. They give teams a chance to reflect on everything that occurred in an individual sprint or after the completion of a product.

An effective retrospective asks the entire team key questions that can improve the process next time around. What went well? What’s worth repeating again? What didn’t go so well? What could be improved upon next time? What roadblocks or dependencies developed? What did you learn? How did you feel at the end of the sprint?

A retrospective provides insights that will improve efficiency, teamwork and team dynamics, the effectiveness of tools, and communication with stakeholders.

Simply holding a retrospective or collecting retrospective feedback is not enough to gain value. You need to ensure you’re incorporating the feedback into the following sprint planning meeting, and take action that leads to meaningful improvement. The next iteration will be all the better for the time you spend reflecting and improving based upon what you learned.

Agile Planning Mistake #6: Choosing tools that don’t take a customer-centric approach

Whether your team uses a Scrum process, kanban boards, or other agile methods, the tools you choose should always be customer-focused. And you need to continue using them in a way that keeps the customer at the forefront of decision making.

Teams can fall into a trap believing they’re focusing on the customer when they aren’t doing much of anything beyond following simple agile methods and generic processes. Customers need to be embedded in your development process right from the planning phase so that every decision a team member makes considers customer needs first.

Choose planning tools that help your entire team get to the heart of what makes your customers tick, and always check in to ensure you are making decisions in line with your customers.

For example, Personas provide a deep understanding of what customers want, need, don’t want, etc. They reveal key information about customer pain points, desires, demographics, goals, shopping patterns, and much more. We highly suggest developing customer Personas to get a rich picture of all the people who will use your product, but it’s not enough to just have Personas lying around.

You need to bring these Personas into your agile planning process and keep them front and center as you complete issues and continue to develop your product.

Scrum teams create release plans to support successful product releases. This helps them maintain their focus on the product vision and feature deliverables.

Here, we’ll explore agile release planning, why it’s important, and best practices to ensure successful releases.

What is agile release planning?

Because software projects are unpredictable, release planning helps team members prioritize their workflow. A release plan focuses on getting specific product features ready for the market. It should examine the product scope, the release date for feature completion, and the resources needed for each release.

The development team uses feedback from earlier product iterations to guide their planning. Product owners and Scrum teams meet to discuss the agile release plan, ensuring everyone understands the required product functionality and the effort needed for each increment.

Instead of planning for a significant product release, teams divide the project scope into short sprints. Many Scrum teams use Jira to help them visualize their sprints and track project status in real time.

Why is release planning important?

Agile release planning is critical for several reasons:

• Strategic alignment: It helps align development activities with broader business goals and customer expectations, so the highest-value features are delivered first
• Predictability: A clear release plan creates predictability, setting realistic expectations for stakeholders and improving overall project transparency
• Risk management: Identifying potential risks and dependencies early helps the team proactively address them, reducing the likelihood of significant delays or setbacks
• Improved collaboration: It promotes collaboration among team members and stakeholders, encouraging clear communication and a shared understanding of project goals
• Separation from product roadmaps: While a product roadmap provides a high-level strategy for the product, a release plan focuses on execution. Understanding this distinction helps teams use both tools effectively.

Project release planning helps software development teams plan, direct, and release each project in increments to serve the customer experience. Teams often use this methodology for short sprints of product development.

Release planning provides agile and Scrum teams with a solid direction to complete their projects. Team members also use this opportunity to use sprint feedback to create increments that align with the next release’s project roadmap.

Getting the product plan together

Release planning seems complex, but with some foresight, it can be simple. Let’s review each part of the process.

1. Who leads the release plan?

Typically, the product development team takes its lead from the Scrum master or the product owner. During the meeting, this leader will raise questions about the product backlog to ensure that sprint discussions align with the final product.

All the product stakeholders should participate in the release plan to ensure their feedback is taken into consideration. Without input from everyone involved in the product development, the team risks missing out on vital information to keep the product roadmap on track.

2. Agile release plan aspects

While the release plan is meant to be agile, it also follows a strict process to ensure that teams keep the product roadmap in sight.

Agile teams take all the sprint planning discussions and evaluate these to detail new product deliverables. Although most organizations will use various approaches in their release planning process, each sprint review should include the following aspects:

• The agreed product development releases at each stage of the sprint
• A direction for each new product release
• Specific current and future iterations due in each upcoming release
• What features and functionality should accompany the iteration
• Specific task requirements for each feature delivery to meet the release goal

By going through an in-depth release planning process, software development teams harness the value of these sprint meetings. The ability to rapidly change direction as necessary ensures the team releases the best possible product.

This constant iteration in each sprint review is also valuable in the dynamic environment of product development.

This level of planning, combined with an iterative schedule to account for the dynamic nature of software, is what makes Agile product development so valuable.

3. Sprint meeting discussions

Sprint meeting discussions revolve around user stories, product backlog, and product backlog items. Scrum release planning also considers other issues such as dependencies and product functionality. Other aspects that the team speaks about involve the next release and the number of sprints they must complete and deliver.

Essentially, team members must keep the product vision in mind for effective release planning. This vision helps team members isolate minimum market sprint feature batches and their release dates.

Sprint meeting discussions should include:

• Release plan prioritization of impending new product features and functionality
• Evaluation and inclusion of stakeholder feedback for each sprint
• Detailed descriptions of sprint deliverables and whether these fall into the category of product short-term increments or major longer-term releases
• Which product version will be ready for release and the ideal sequence of product releases to achieve each release goal

Development teams build several product versions. After creating these versions, they prioritize them to release the most important ones to users.

Part of the purpose of release planning is to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same product development page. Another element of these sprint planning meetings is to drive ownership and acceptance of the product vision.

Development of the release plan

There are four steps that software development teams follow to create their product plan.

1. Creating the vision

First, you need to define the vision for the product. Creating a clear vision produces a roadmap for the team to follow in each consecutive sprint. This vision should align with market demand and the product owner’s goals.

It also encourages team members to sift through which features they should prioritize. Similarly, the product roadmap helps teams evaluate the resources they need during the sprint review. Product planning also enables teams to be flexible. Planning reviews ensure direction changes to accommodate ongoing increments to achieve overall release goals.

2. Prioritization of the product backlog

After defining the vision, team members focus on prioritizing features in the product backlog. Here, stakeholder inputs must align with the vision to successfully implement user stories. User stories are vital to the process as they provide the background for detailing product features or functionality.

The product manager provides the team with direction at this stage to outline a viable release plan. This release plan must include the product release goals, release dates, and prioritization of user stories.

3. Set the Scrum planning meeting

The next step in the planning meeting is for the stakeholders to review the plan. Team members now have the chance to adjust deliverables in line with the vision.

Everyone must agree to the release plan at this stage before they can move forward to the next release.

Meeting agenda

Setting up a meeting agenda helps manage the release plan. The essential elements of the agenda for the Scrum framework include:

1. Product plan assessment

The Scrum team reviews the product roadmap to ensure that everyone accepts the product vision and goals.

2. Architecture evaluation

With each release, the Scrum team and product owner evaluate the previous sprint’s architecture. They examine the technical details of the product development and discuss any potential problems that can impact the product release.

Scrum teams go over the scope and estimates of their release plan. Team members determine whether their planning includes the risk of technical debt and if they can complete certain task aspects, such as documenting their work to meet deadlines. Stakeholders also review dependencies that can influence the product versions’ functionality.

3. Velocity and iteration assessment

Scrum teams go over previous iterations to review their velocity estimates. They align their estimates with the suggested iteration schedule to ensure they cover all vital elements.

The product manager controls this assessment to ensure points are assigned to user stories. Assessing user stories and assigning points demonstrate the level of effort the team must invest in each iteration. The total number of story points then represents the estimation of release dates for each sprint release.

An iteration schedule is built by the agile team to determine their velocity for the current and subsequent sprints during this assessment.

The team creates the release scope, which includes all the necessary releases. The Scrum master assigns work to each team member, and all the stakeholders agree to the plan before moving to the next step.

4. Agreement on the definition of done

The team members must now discuss what will qualify as the definition of done for each feature release. Team members must consider whether their evaluation of user stories meets all the product owner's acceptance criteria for release. Once they can prove the acceptance criteria are met in their assessment, they will know that a release completion is valid.

The definition of done must confirm that team members have completed all their assigned tasks for the user story. Team members must also record each task so that the product owner can assess their work.

5. Populate the product release schedule

The project manager can now populate and complete the release plan schedule. All stakeholders should be able to access the calendar to track progress. This release plan schedule helps everyone stay focused on product deliverables and release dates.

Best practices for agile release planning

To make your agile release planning effective, follow these key best practices:

• Set a clear product vision: Define a clear, shared vision that aligns with your customers’ needs and business goals. This helps guide your team's priorities and decision-making throughout the project.
• Prioritize features by customer value: Clearly identify and prioritize features that provide the greatest value to your customers and the organization. This helps your team stay focused on delivering impactful results.
• Regularly review and adapt your goals: Agile release plans aren’t set in stone. Regular check-ins ensure that goals remain relevant as priorities shift based on customer feedback, business needs, or market changes.
• Clarify roles and responsibilities: Make sure everyone on the team understands their role and what’s expected of them. Clear roles enhance accountability and help prevent misunderstandings or duplicated effort.
• Define a 'Definition of Done': Establish clear acceptance criteria for what constitutes a completed feature or release. This ensures technical and functional completeness before deployment.
• Integrate DevOps practices: Aligning agile release planning with DevOps methodologies enhances collaboration between development and operations teams, improving deployment frequency and reliability.
• Plan small, incremental releases: Break down large product releases into smaller increments. This approach lets your team deliver frequent updates, gather user feedback early, and adapt quickly to customer demands.

Get help with your release planning

Agile release planning is a vital part of the software development team’s success. Create a comprehensive agile release plan for minor or major releases, and you make your life simpler for an upcoming release. Focusing on the release plan calendar helps keep product owners and team members aware of the overall product vision.

At Easy Agile, we offer tools that support agile release planning directly within Jira. Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports collaborative release planning in Jira. The highly-visual story map format transforms the flat Jira backlog into a meaningful picture of work, making it easier to manage your backlog and plan your release.