Backlog grooming is a key part of sprint planning and the product management process in general. But there are many ways you can optimize these backlog grooming sessions that you may not know about.

Keep reading to find out what backlog grooming is and its benefits as well as some of the best practices for running your own backlog refinement sessions.

What is backlog grooming?

Backlog grooming (also known as backlog refinement or backlog management) sessions are meetings where your product team (including employees, product managers and product owners) gets together to discuss and review your product backlog and figure out what to prioritize next. Your product backlog is an itemized list of all upcoming product features and changes to be made.

Some of the tasks involved in these sessions include adding new user stories according to user feedback; breaking down larger items or user stories into smaller pieces; reordering features based on priorities; and identifying potential roadblocks and trying to minimize risk.

Backlog management and grooming sessions are regular parts of the project management cycle, and often come at the end of a Scrum iteration or sprint. They are an essential step in figuring out what your product team's next steps are and how best to tackle them.

The benefits of backlog grooming

Backlog grooming has many different benefits. Let's go over some of our favourites.

Your backlog stays clean and relevant.

Regularly grooming your backlog is the best way to keep your product backlog clean and boost workflow in the process. For many product teams, the features that end up on your backlog are a result of input from many different sources—e.g. stakeholders, customers, and higher-ups—which often means item can overlap or conflict with each other. You might have several similar requests which can be bundled together, or several items that diametrically oppose each other. You might even have old requests you've already dealt with and forget to delete. Through all of this mess, some features can fall through the cracks and get lost.

A good, well-groomed backlog makes sure you stay on top of what needs to be done next. It also helps you keep your backlog relevant by getting rid of unnecessary and irrelevant tasks so the more relevant features can be easily prioritized instead.

Your product team is kept up-to-date.

Keeping your backlog organized is one of the best resources for any product team to have. By having a shared resource for everyone to access and easily figure out what needs to be done next helps keep everyone on the same page and builds momentum going forward.

Team efficiency and work velocity is increased.

A well-groomed product backlog helps your development team deliver features more quickly and helps build team momentum. This in turn can help your team be more productive instead of getting caught up trying to figure out what to do next in sprint planning sessions.

Communication is improved.

Your backlog is a great source of information for your team, and it can easily help you communicate product strategy and next steps to everyone if you use it right. It's also a great way to help gather feedback from your team to get additional opinions and points-of-view that you may not have gotten otherwise.

Backlog grooming activities

Backlog grooming sessions have three main parts. Let's discuss each and how to best implement them.

Eliminate and add user stories

Adding and removing user stories or features is probably the most well-known part of backlog grooming. This is where you look at everything on your backlog and decide what is dead weight and what gaps need to be filled. 

Often, this is done through user stories. What kinds of customers are using your products? What are these customers using your product for? What do they want from your product? Thinking about these questions can help you figure out what to keep or add to your backlog.

Update priorities

Your priorities will often change throughout the product development process, and  therefore your product backlog items will need to change too. Are there things that are suddenly higher priority? Things that are less urgent?

Make sure to update your backlog regularly as you reassess your priorities and grow your product.

Splitting user stories

 Finally, a core part of sprint backlog grooming meetings is splitting user stories and larger features up. Are some things higher priority but too large to tackle in your next iteration? See if you can break down that item into smaller pieces so you can get the highest priority piece done first.

Backlog grooming: best practices

Now that we've discussed what backlog grooming sessions are and what takes place within them, here are our top tricks and tricks for getting the most out of those sessions.

Make meetings more efficient

One of the best ways to make the backlog grooming process more efficient is to make sure your backlog refinement meetings themselves are efficient.

First and foremost, it's important to come prepared to each sprint planning meeting. This means having an agenda and clearly defined objectives and goals you want to meet during this time as well as a plan of what needs to be discussed. This will help cut wasted time and keep your meetings nice and short, allowing you to spend more time getting work done.

Likewise, it's also a good idea to try and limit the number of people attending your meetings. This will help you keep the meeting focused, as too many people speaking and giving input can muddy up the roadmap and distract from the larger issues.

One of the best ways to do this is by posting the discussed items and key points on a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel—or a Scrum tool like ScrumGenius—so those that don't need to be in the meeting itself but still want to stay up-to-date on progress, like shareholders or higherups, can still be kept in the loop.

Keep your customers in mind

Your customers are who you're building your product for, and they're who you need to keep in mind during your backlog grooming sessions. What do they want? What are they looking forward to? What does the feedback you get from them say? This will help you figure out what needs to be prioritized and what can be pushed until later.

Identify any dependencies

Sometimes, you'll have backlog items or user stories that you can't work on until other items are completed. Identifying and anticipating these dependencies can get rid of potential blockers and boost your workflow in the process. Instead, focus on tasks that you can get started on immediately or knock out the tasks you need to get done in order to do others first.

Listen throughout the process

Listening during the refinement process is possibly the most important tip we can give you for improving your backlog grooming sessions. Your development team and other teams working on your product will have unique points-of-view that you might not have considered, and this can help you make better, more objective choices. Above all, keeping an open mind is key.

Groom your backlog a few days before the sprint ends

The best time to conduct backlog grooming sessions is 2-3 days before your next sprint cycle starts.

There are several reasons for this. First, it makes sure you're close enough to the end of the sprint that you'll have a good sense of what will be accomplished without having to interrupt your workflow between sprints. It also helps you prepare your tea for the upcoming sprint in advance and makes sure everyone knows what to look forward to.

Make backlog grooming meetings fun

Backlog grooming sessions shouldn't be boring. While they do need to stick to a pre-set list of tasks and objectives, there's still some wiggle room for personalization. Start with an icebreaker, or ask everyone how they're doing. This can also help boost morale and make your team more productive in the long run.

 Use a feedback management system

Having a great feedback management system is one of the best ways to get the most out of your customer feedback. When figuring out what items in your backlog to prioritize, knowing what your customers want is essential.

Collecting user feedback to analyze and make informed decisions based of off can help you improve customer satisfaction and create a better product in the process. Our all-in-one customer feedback management platform helps you collect user feedback from around the internet so you can make better-informed choices about your product.

UserVitals also helps you create a roadmap and changelog to keep everyone on the same page and close the feedback loop. Learn more about what UserVitals can do for you today.