Product Backlog Management

Suppose a Product Backlog is indeed visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next. Are the items that are clearly being lined up “ready” for Sprint Planning? Might they first have to be refined to “ready” by the Scrum Team? Might the Product Owner need to help with this?

The Product Owner can create a list of items, provide long detailed narratives for each item that people can read to understand the requested work, put the items in an order to indicate the value of doing one item over another, and put all of this in some location (physical or digital) that everyone can see it.   This satisfies bullet #1. 

But no matter how detailed the narratives for the item, in order to properly execute on the Product Backlog Item, the Development Team may need additional details so that the proper technical solutions can be determined.  There are usually multiple technical ways to provide a solution for a problem statement.  So the Development Team will need to know how each item in the Product Backlog could relate to each other at the technical level in order to ensure that they are providing the best technical solutions for the long term.  Knowing that for Item A an user interface that shows a list of information pulled from a database is needed can be solved in many ways.  Knowing that for Item B, an user interface that allows the modification of information pulled from a database can also be solved in many ways.  But knowing the needs of both Item A and Item B, will usually lead a development team to arrive at a common technical solution that can be used to satisfy the needs of both items. This information could be provided in the initial detailed narrative but it is critical that the Product Owner works with the Development Team to ensure that the details needed by them is available and understood. 

This is a very simple example but I hope it at least illustrates one point that can help you to understand more.