10 Powerful Strategies To Break Down Product Backlog Items

Great Scrum Teams know that refinement is one of the best ways to optimize the flow of work and deliver more value to stakeholders. Refinement is the act of breaking down and clarifying work for this and upcoming Sprints. We also know this from our research with 1.200 Scrum Teams; teams that actively refine also release more frequently. And they have more satisfied stakeholders and higher morale.

Sounds good! But how? It is often surprisingly hard for teams to break down large chunks of work in such a way that the smaller pieces still deliver value on their own. Often, work is broken down across technical layers (horizontal) instead of functional layers (vertical).

In this podcast, we share the 10 strategies that have worked well for us, and the Scrum Teams we've been part of. Each strategy breaks work across functional layers. We give examples for each strategy and explain how they support your team and the Product Owner.  We still actively use them for our work on the Scrum Team Survey too!

We apologize for the length. You can easily listen to the episode in parts though.

Download the cheatsheet (it is free):
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/free-downloads/products/experiment-10-powerful-strategies-to-break-down-product-backlog-items

Get the Powerful Questions deck:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/scrum-teams/products/powerful-questions

Read the original post this podcast is based on:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/10-powerful-strategies-for-breaking-down-user-stories-in-scrum-with-cheatsheet-2cd9aae7d0eb

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The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.