Did you try Behavior Driven Development?

Yes, we did it in SpecFlow. BDD is a great approach for collaboration between devs, testers and POs. I can totally recommend to give it a try. 

My company has a mix with some teams using BDD, others preferring pure programming code without BDD on top. 

IMHO, BDD works great when the 3 amigos (business + dev + test) people on a project collectively use it throughout - i.e. with all 3 involved and using it from the very start of product design, scoping and feature build all the way to development, test and demoing. The benefits then become a shared understanding of a problem through to its solution, in-built documentation and far reduced scope of misunderstandings + development not in line with the requirements.

As soon as only 1 team use it alone/siloed, for example a testing team, or worse still, a test automation team within the test team, the benefits are mostly lost & it’s just added overhead (somewhat wasted effort + cost) at that point...

Yes, on my current project BDD is being used.

We do it like this:

1. I as a tester write test scenarios for the feature before coding starts
2. The test scenarios get reviewed by the PO and one other tests, sometimes developer too
3. After the test scenarios have been combed trough the developer will add them as acceptance test on the API level
4. Once that is done the feature gets developed and code reviewed
5. I end to end test it once again 
6. After my testing the PO tests it as well
7. And at the end it gets deployed

It takes a bit more time and effort to go through all of that, but though this process we really distil the requirements and practically have no significate defects escaping to production.