One way to address poorly defined product backlog items is to spend time refining the items as you go. Refining the backlog continuously helps the team deliver consistently and can lead to shorter planning meetings at the start of the sprint. It can even help improve reliability, velocity, and the quality of work.

While teams are composed of individuals, all of whom solve problems and make decisions, people on consistently successful teams understand that they can be more effective when the focus is on the team, not the individual. Making the best decisions collectively delivers the most value to customers in the long run.

There are lots of good practices that people will tell you aren’t agile. Usually this comes from people who read a book on Scrum or Extreme Programming and took it literally. But agile is not methods and tools associated with a particular methodology; as long as you follow the agile principles, anything is fair game.