Improve Growth Team refinement process
Context
Consistent way of refining and breaking down work items is extremely important for the efficient flow of work through the Kanban development board -
not having enough estimated and refined issues which are ready for development is not healthy for the process as it will cause slowdowns in later stages of the pipeline and may also affect the overall quality of work. This issue focuses on establishing a consistent and recurring process of refining issues which are in ~workflow::planning breakdown
stage. Right now we don't have any defined process and it's not clear who is responsible for refinement and when, and even when it finally happens it's usually a work of one engineer - where it should be teamwork, ensuring that we have input from all engineers.
Expectations
The refinement process...
- should involve entire development team, not just a single engineer (this ensures that everyone has a chance to read through the issue, point out any concerns or questions and have a vote on issue's weight)
- should favour async ways of communication
- should be timeboxed (otherwise it can go on for a very long time - there should be a moment where we can safely say we know enough, otherwise this is clear sign the issue is too complex and needs further splitting)
- should be continuous (meaning that there will be a process of ensuring that issues are moving to refinement stage steadily, based on the situation on Kanban board)
💡 Ideas
- Refinement thread should be a template containing some guidelines on refinement as well as some checklist that will ensure that we meet our expectations of ready (what it means for issue to be "ready for development")