When it comes to prioritisation at the planning session itself, here are some possible questions that can help guide our decisions. The goal here is to enable the team itself to prioritise what’s most important, without the need for waiting for a Product Lead to decide.

• Which stories provide the most customer value (Prioritise by business value)? – Product Lead
• Which items provide the most benefit to the business (Factor in the estimated effort to do the work)? – Product Lead
• What are low-hanging fruits (Factor in the estimated effort to do the work)? – Product Lead & Dev Team
• Which items are the riskiest (Mitigate risks by identifying and planning risky Items appropriately)? – Product Lead & Dev Team
• Which items result in the highest cost if not done (Consider the cost of delaying a piece of work)? – Product Lead
• What are the dependencies between items (Identify dependencies to work out a natural order of priorities)? – Product Lead & Dev Team
• Which items contribute most to our Sprint/Week's goal (Determine what items contribute most to achieving the sprint/week's goal)? – Product Lead
• What is the next highest priority item to deliver this sprint/week? – Product Lead & Dev Team.
• What else do we need to understand about this story? Is the deliverable and definition of done clear? Do the acceptance criteria adequately define the requirements of the story? – Product Lead & Dev Team.
• Do we understand our implementation approach for this story? Do we need to have a quick discussion or schedule an offline meeting as part of this story work? – Dev Team.
• What is our tactical approach for delivering this story? Can we list out the things we need to do? – Dev Team.
• Are we considering all the work that is needed to fully complete & deliver the story? – Dev Team.
• Is this user story and its tasks conducive to swarming so that one team member can take on one task at one time? – Dev Team
• Check for conflicts – Can the set of stories in our sprint backlog be accomplished together in this sprint? – Dev Team
• Definition of done – Will we be able to deliver a fully “Done” increment of our product at the end of the sprint? – Dev Team
• Missing Backlog item – Is the team aware of any work that needs to be done that is not included in the sprint backlog, including maintenance and overhead items, spikes, release planning activities, or any other activity that needs to be accomplished this sprint? – Product Lead & Dev Team.
• Risks: Are there any other risks or circumstances that we need to be aware of during this sprint? – Dev Team

<aside> 💡 The term sprint here doesn't necessarily mean the bulk of work to be done within a specified timeframe as described in the Scrum framework. Regardless of framework used (Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, etc), the act of planning work to be done and outlining a period for doing that work is what we mean by the word sprint. Sprint = Chosen bulk of problems to be solved by a team within a specific period of time...

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