Backlog Grooming: Why You Need It and How to Run It

Understanding the Process

The Goals and Objectives of Backlog Grooming

Tasks in a backlog can quickly become outdated, but with regular backlog grooming, you can keep it current and relevant. When tasks have clear priorities, the team knows exactly what they should be working on next and what can wait.

Since product development is an ongoing process, it’s natural for tasks to become obsolete and for priorities to shift. To make sure your backlog reflects what's actually happening in a team, each task needs to be regularly reviewed.

The key objectives of backlog grooming are to prioritize every task, break down the big ones, and estimate the effort required to complete them.

Who Should Attend?

A typical backlog grooming session includes:

• The Product Owner or Scrum Master, who usually leads the meeting as the facilitator;
• The team members who are actively building the product.

How Often Should You Hold a Backlog Grooming Session?

The frequency of these meetings really depends on your team's needs. You can hold them on a regular schedule, like once a week, or you can meet whenever enough new tasks have piled up in the backlog to warrant a discussion.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Backlog Grooming

1. Getting Ready for the Session

Before your backlog meeting, it’s important to take care of all the organizational details so the meeting can be productive. This means scheduling the meeting, inviting the participants, and if it's your first time, explaining to your colleagues why backlog grooming is so valuable.

You also need to decide what you'll cover. Will you go through the entire backlog or just a specific part of it, like tasks related to a new feature?

2. Prioritizing Backlog Items

The discussion usually follows the order of the backlog, from top to bottom. Each task needs to be assigned a priority so that the team can start working on the most important items — the ones that deliver the most value to your customers.

To help you make these priority calls, you can lean on established prioritization frameworks, such as:

• MoSCoW (Must, Could, Should, Won’t)
• RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)
• ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort)
• WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First)
• Kano Model — this is a method that comes from the marketing world and helps you think about how users will emotionally react to different product features.

3. Detailing and Clarifying Requirements

For example, for a task like "Add a category filter," your acceptance criteria might look like this:

• The filter must show all existing product categories;
• The user must be able to select multiple categories at once;
• When a category is selected, the product list must update without refreshing the whole page;
• The chosen filters should stay active as the user moves around the site.

4. Estimating Task Complexity

Often, teams estimate how much work a task will require based on their past experience. Over time, they get a good feel for how long different kinds of tasks usually take.

However, this gut-feeling estimation can be off, especially when the team comes across new types of tasks they haven't handled before. In those cases, other estimation techniques can help you be more accurate:

• Time-based estimation (e.g., estimating in hours or days);
• Estimation using Story Points.

5. Breaking Down Large Tasks (Decomposition)

Some tasks in the backlog might look small at first, but once you start digging in, you realize they're actually huge. For example, a task like "add a support chat to the app" might actually involve a lot of different steps: designing the UI, building the back-end, integrating a notification system, and thorough testing. Suddenly, one task has turned into several.

During backlog grooming, it’s important to spot these large tasks and decompose them, or break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

6. Documenting the Results

The outcomes of your backlog grooming session need to be written down. This is usually done by the facilitator or someone assigned to take notes. Recording the results creates a clear record of the decisions made about tasks and allows for ongoing tracking of changes to the backlog.

Tools for Backlog Management

You can run a backlog grooming session even if your team isn't using a task tracker yet. In any business, tasks are tracked somehow — whether it's in online spreadsheets, simple lists, or even sticky notes on a whiteboard. During your meeting, you can go through these and analyze each task.

Of course, task trackers make life a lot easier by helping you keep an eye on your product backlog. You don't need super-specialized features for backlog grooming — just the ability to set priorities, estimate effort, and link smaller tasks to bigger epics is usually enough.

However, as your company grows and you have more products in development, you'll likely need a more specialized platform, not just for backlog management, but for the entire IT product lifecycle. 

As a company scales, managing tasks, coordinating teams, and ensuring quality gets more complex. This is where a framework like IT Service Management (ITSM) can help you build the structure and processes needed to effectively manage and develop your IT services at every stage.

It's often pointed out that to take things to the next level, a team can adopt a specialized system for software development that integrates both SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) and ITSM (IT Service Management). This can lead to higher-quality business processes, better team coordination, and more effective management of the IT product lifecycle, all driven by valuable user feedback.

Summary

Regular backlog grooming brings much-needed clarity to your work, helps you allocate resources effectively, and keeps your team focused on the tasks that deliver the most value.

Well-run meetings with the whole team and the right tools cut down on time wasted on irrelevant tasks, improve the quality of your sprint planning, and help you release product updates faster. As a result, your team can respond more quickly to market changes and user needs, which has a direct and positive impact on your key business goals.