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Backlog Refinement

Backlog Refinement is our recurring Scrum ceremony to keep upcoming work clear, prioritized, and ready for delivery. It enables smoother sprint planning and execution by aligning product and engineering on scope, timing, and ownership.

🎯 Outcome​

Active Milestones ✅ are up to date, and New Milestones have been created in Asana: team-product-sprint-goals. These are ready to be reviewed and used as input during the upcoming sprint planning meeting 🗓️.

📋 Guidelines​

  1. Mark them as Milestones — it's easier to manage everything if they are all the same type
  2. Name them as --> {Initiative Name} | {Milestone Type} | {optional Description} — it's easier to sort and see across these over time if they have the same naming convention
    1. Milestone Type is one of (tell me if there are other ones that's worth adding):
      1. eng build milestone
      2. Released to Pilot
      3. Released to GA
    2. made up examples
      1. Protocols | Cervical Cancer GA Launch
      2. Protocols | BP Protocol Eng Build | new task UI completed
      3. Encounter Phase 1 | Click to Call Eng Build | Twilio Integration
  3. For prior sprint's milestones, please set the appropriate fields before we show up to sprint planning:
    1. If completed already, mark the milestone as complete
    2. If not completed yet, change the due date to the right timing
    3. Don't change the Sprint Date or the Actual Sprints fields yet — I'd like to do that live in the meeting so we explicitly talk about those
  4. Please try and flag any contention points for us to discuss prior to the meeting as a result of your grooming sessions in this e.g.,
    1. pod-scale likely needs more bandwidth in order to manage everything on their current agenda
    2. pod-encounters has billing/claims work that should be handled by pod-scale that understands claims

🗓️ Planning inputs​

  1. 🛠️ Initiatives in Build phase
    1. Ready for Eng
    2. Planned milestones from on-going initiatives
  2. 📝 Initiatives in Spec phase
    1. Set expectations that an engineer should provide early feedback
    2. Determine when it’s ready to build / handoff to eng
    3. Identify eng point of contact
  3. 🗂️ Domain-specific backlogs
    1. Claims
      1. On-call items (e.g., answer Finance team questions)
      2. Implementations (e.g., new billing logic)
    2. Compliance
      1. 📄 e.g., resubmit reports
  4. 🧹 Opportunities for Product/Technical Debt
  5. 📊 Capacity
    1. Engineering - On Call rotation
    2. OOO