Engineering PBR "Three Pencils" or How to Build a Value Stream and Achieve Guaranteed Delivery

A value stream is not just a trendy new name for a department—it’s a method of organising production that creates a funnel for validating product hypotheses, from their identification and formulation to the release of a real product and getting feedback.

How to structure and fine-tune this process?

The answer lies in the method of cascade grooming, decomposition, and estimation, led by a business analyst.

In large enterprises with complex engineering landscapes, we enhance traditional PBR (Product Backlog Refinement) approaches with the “Three Pencils” engineering grooming method. Business analysts, together with the development team, now have a simple tool that allows them to quickly transform a relatively raw product idea into a production plan—completed with identified risks, dependencies, and complexity estimates.

How did we implement this method, test it and confirm its effectiveness? And how are we scaling it across the entire organisation? We’ll share all this in our talk.