13 Alternative Workshops to Product Backlog Refinement meeting

We all hate meetings. For me, we meet to get something out of it. Refining the backlog is an essential step in the scrum team predictability. I propose 12 workshops as an alternative to the PBR meeting.

#1. Together alone workshop. The full team meets to refine the backlog, but each one of the team members works separately on a specific topic. You can create groups of 2 people, but I strongly recommend each team member to work alone. The Product Owner will turn to all the team members to provide further clarification or to answer questions. Each team member will need to write the description and the acceptance criteria of the user stories. At the end of the workshop, the team comes back together. Each team member presents to his/her colleagues the user stories written, and together they make further adjustments, clarifications and estimate the user story.