Without an effective backlogue grooming process, teams risk a backlogue susceptible to disorganisation, resulting in decreased collaboration and project delays. Learning how to run practical backlogue grooming sessions can lead to more productive engagements and help keep your team aligned — ensuring that valuable time is spent on work that truly matters. This practice is fundamental to Agile methodologies, acting as a proactive measure to maintain order, clarity and focus throughout product development cycles.

This article will provide a comprehensive guide to understanding and implementing effective backlogue grooming. This post will cover:

• What is backlogue grooming?
• Who owns the backlogue grooming process.
• Backlogue refinement best practices.
• Adobe Workfront: A solution for effective backlogue grooming.

What is backlogue grooming?

Backlogue grooming is a session in which project managers and other stakeholders communicate, analyse and prioritise backlogue items. Commonly referred to as backlogue refinement or backlogue management, backlogue grooming aims to keep the backlogue up to date and ensure that items are ready for impending sprints.

Backlogue refinement meetings offer a chance for a cross-functional team to review the progress of products in development. When done effectively and at the right cadence, these sessions can help to prevent the backlogue from growing into an overwhelming amount of content.

The goal of backlogue grooming.

The primary goals of backlogue grooming are to review outstanding user stories in the backlogue, verify that they're correctly prioritised and ensure that they’re ready for sprint preparations. By the end of the session, you should have an organised and prioritised list of user stories.

Many agile practitioners say that a DEEP product backlogue is the key outcome of a backlogue refinement session. The DEEP acronym highlights some critical traits associated with the product backlogue:

• Detailed appropriately: Stories and other backlogue items should contain enough contextual information to be understood and discussed by the cross-functional team.

• Emergent: Adding new items and stories should be simple as new information becomes available, so nothing is finalised.

• Estimated: The effort required for each user story should be estimated through a measurement that’s agreed upon by the team.
• Prioritised: Items in the backlogue should be ranked depending on their tactical purpose and the value they provide.

The DEEP product backlogue acronym can be a good way to keep your team on track, but it’s up to your organisation to determine what processes work best for your team.

Benefits of backlogue grooming.

Consistent and effective backlogue refinement provides numerous benefits that ripple throughout the Agile team and the broader organisation, significantly affecting project outcomes and overall productivity. These advantages range from enhanced operational efficiency to improved team dynamics and product quality.

Here are several ways your team can benefit from backlogue grooming:

• Improved sprint planning: A well-refined backlogue is the bedrock of effective sprint planning. When items are already clarified, estimated and prioritised in advance, sprint planning meetings become shorter, more focused and more productive. The team can concentrate on delivering the work rather than spending excessive time trying to understand it.
• Increased work velocity: By ensuring tasks are clearly defined and appropriately sized, refinement reduces ambiguity and the likelihood of rework. This streamlining of workflows means less wasted time and resources, enabling the team to deliver value more consistently and sustainably.
• Reduced waste: Unnecessary tasks or features that don't align with current business outcomes can be identified and removed during refinement.
• Enhanced team collaboration: Backlogue refinement is inherently a collaborative activity, fostering communication and shared ownership among the Product Owner, development team and other stakeholders. This strengthens team cohesion and ensures everyone is working towards the same objectives.
• Transparency: The process ensures that everyone involved in the project is aware of the status of different items and upcoming priorities — leading to fewer interruptions and more productive work.
• Improved risk management: Refinement sessions provide an opportunity to identify potential roadblocks, dependencies between items and technical complexities early in the process. Addressing these issues proactively minimises surprises and delays during sprints.
• Improved client or customer satisfaction: By aligning development efforts with clearly understood customer needs, teams are more likely to deliver products that meet or exceed customer expectations, thereby improving overall product quality and satisfaction. Consistent refinement ensures alignment with the product roadmap and contributes to long-term quality.

Collectively, these benefits directly contribute to a more agile and responsive organisation. This, in turn, can lead to a faster time-to-market for valuable features, providing a significant competitive advantage in today's fast-paced business environment. Thus, backlogue refinement is not merely an internal operational improvement — it's a strategic enabler for achieving broader business objectives.

Who owns the backlogue grooming process?

The product owner or product manager should own the backlogue grooming process, but they may not solely be responsible for hosting backlogue grooming sessions, depending on the hierarchical structure of your organisation. The Scrum Master, a project manager or another team member could also lead these sessions.

A more critical component of the process is ensuring your designated team members have the skills necessary to manage backlogue grooming. The designated person's conduct during the sessions will determine the future productivity and success of the projects. You can experiment with different roles before deciding who’s the best fit to lead the refinement session.

Regardless of who facilitates explicitly, the core responsibilities associated with owning and running the backlogue refinement process include:

• Scheduling: Organising the session at an appropriate frequency and ensuring all necessary participants are invited and can attend.

• Agenda preparation: Creating a clear agenda and sharing it with attendees in advance to allow for preparation.

• Guiding discussions: Leading the team through the selected backlogue items, with the Product Owner providing explanations, context and answering business-related questions.

• Maintaining focus: Keeping conversations on topic and ensuring discussions lead to actionable outcomes.

• Time management: Adhering to the allocated time for the session and for individual items.

• Facilitating decision-making: Guiding the team through clarifying requirements, defining acceptance criteria, estimating effort and making prioritisation decisions.

• Documentation: Ensuring that all decisions, changes to items, estimates and priorities are accurately captured — typically within the team's backlogue management tool.

• Follow-up communication: Summarise key outcomes, action items and communicate them to the team and relevant stakeholders after the session.

Ultimately, the individual leading the refinement process must possess strong communication, moderation and organisational skills to steer the team towards a well-understood and actionable backlogue.

Who should attend backlogue grooming sessions?

These events are meant to be collaborative, so the entire cross-functional team should be represented at refinement sessions.

At a minimum, the following people need to be involved in backlogue grooming sessions:

• Facilitator: This should be someone who facilitates the session. It could be a product owner, product manager, Scrum Master, project manager or even an Agile coach or consultant.
• Engineers or developers: These people own the narratives stored in the backlogue.
• Delivery team: While the entire team plays a key role in bringing your company’s products to your customer base, if the group is too large to include everyone, you can consider inviting only members of management.
• Quality assurance representatives: These team members can share user insights related to the backlogue of inputs.

The key is to invite only those people who are critical to the task at hand — too many collaborators and ideas can overwhelm the session. Additionally, make sure that you have conversations with stakeholders before backlogue refinement, rather than during the sessions.

Backlogue refinement best practices.

While individual business needs may vary, there are some best practices you can follow to maximise the team’s time and effort. High-performing Agile teams adopt a set of best practices to ensure these sessions are consistently valuable and drive real results. These practices cover everything — from preparation to defining work items and the techniques used to manage them.

Assign responsibilities.

Effective backlogue refinement doesn't just happen — it begins well before the scheduled meeting time. Failure to prepare adequately is a common reason for inefficient and unproductive sessions. When all attendees invest time in preparation, the refinement meeting shifts from a passive information download into an active, collaborative working session.

This shift enables the team to delve deeper into discussions, problem-solving and decision-making rather than wasting valuable meeting time on disseminating basic information. The focus moves from merely learning about items to actively refining them, which is the core purpose of the gathering.

• Product owner responsibilities: The product owner should come thoroughly prepared. This includes creating a clear agenda, identifying specific backlogue items that will be the focus of the session and gathering any necessary background information, data or preliminary stakeholder input. They should also have a firm grasp of the overall project strategy and relevant key performance indicators to guide prioritisation discussions.

• Backlogue attendee responsibilities: All participants should review the agenda and any shared pre-reading materials. Team members must come prepared to discuss the value and implications of features they might advocate for — having already considered how these items align with the broader product roadmap, stakeholder priorities and defined customer personas.

Structure a backlogue clearly.

A monolithic, disorganised backlogue can quickly become unwieldy and a source of confusion. High-performing teams understand the importance of structuring their backlogue for clarity and manageability.

• Categorisation: Instead of a single, sprawling list, it's advisable to split the backlogue into logical categories. For example, teams might maintain a development backlogue (for committed work), a product backlogue (for upcoming features and improvements) and an insights backlogue (for raw ideas, user feedback and research findings). This separation enables the teams to manage and review different types of items in a manner that aligns with the needs of the organisation.
• Clear naming and labelling: Each backlogue item should have a clear, concise and descriptive name. Consistent labelling or tagging can further aid organisation and filtering.
• Defined inflow: Establish clear workflows for capturing and funneling new requests, ideas, bug reports and other inputs into the appropriate backlogue or backlogue section. This ensures that incoming items are not lost and can be systematically reviewed and prioritised.

Categorising backlogues effectively serves as a form of information architecture for the product development process. It reduces cognitive overload for the team and allows different stakeholders to concentrate on the sections most relevant to their roles.

Break down large items.

A common challenge in backlogue management is dealing with significant, complex features or requirements — often referred to as epics. A key best practice in refinement is to break these epics down into smaller, more manageable user stories that can be completed within a single sprint.

• Benefits of smaller stories: Smaller stories are less daunting for the team, easier to understand and estimate accurately. They also allow for more frequent delivery of incremental value and facilitate faster feedback loops from users and stakeholders.
• Techniques for breakdown: This can involve splitting epics by user roles, process steps, business rules or technical layers. User story mapping is a visual technique that can be particularly helpful in identifying the constituent parts of a larger user journey and breaking it down into actionable stories.

The act of breaking down epics is not merely an exercise in making work appear smaller. It is a critical step in de-risking development and enabling actual iterative progress. Each smaller story represents a testable increment in functionality.

Manage dependencies.

Few backlogue items exist in complete isolation. Identifying and managing dependencies between user stories or tasks is a crucial aspect of refining the backlogue.

• Impact of unmanaged dependencies: Unidentified or unmanaged dependencies are a common source of sprint disruptions, bottlenecks and delays. A team might start work on a story only to find it's blocked by another story that hasn't been completed or even started.

• Proactive identification: During refinement, teams should actively look for dependencies. This might involve asking questions like, "does this story rely on any other work being done first?" or "will any other work be blocked if this story isn't completed?"

• Visualisation: Dependencies can be visualised (e.g., on a story map, a physical board with strings or within backlogue management tools) to help the product owner sequence work logically and teams to co-ordinate their efforts.

Avoid common challenges.

To maximise the benefits of backlogue refinement, it's essential to recognise and address the common pitfalls that can derail the process.

Challenge - Unplanned backlogue sessions: One of the most frequent issues is neglecting to hold regular refinement sessions or conducting them without a clear plan or agenda. This can lead to a stale backlogue and inefficient meetings.

Solution: Establish a regular, recurring cadence for refinement sessions (e.g., weekly or bi-weekly) and ensure each session has a prepared agenda with specific items targeted for discussion.

Challenge - Undefined goals and scope of user stories: Vague backlogue items, lack of clear goals or have poorly defined scope can lead to confusion, extended discussions and difficulty in estimation.

Solution: Ensure each story has a clear purpose and value proposition. Apply the INVEST criteria to assess story quality and work towards meeting a team-defined “Definition of Ready" (DoR) before considering an item sprint-ready.

Challenge - Lack of prioritisation or ignoring dependencies: An unprioritised backlogue or one where dependencies are not identified and managed, can result in teams working on low-value items or frequently encountering blockages.

Solution: Employ a consistent and transparent prioritisation method. Actively identify dependencies during refinement and ensure the Product Owner sequences work accordingly.

Adobe Workfront: A solution for effective backlogue grooming.

Workfront helps teams create high-quality work together with speed and efficiency. It offers highly visual collaboration tools and automation features that streamline review workflow — all within a centralised location. This ensures everyone has equal, real-time visibility into the status of a project and its constituent parts, including the backlogue of items being prepared for future work.

Avoiding common pitfalls requires discipline and a commitment to the principles outlined. The adoption of suitable collaboration and project management tools — like Workfront — can further empower teams by providing the necessary infrastructure for visibility, communication and workflow management.

To explore how Workfront can support your team's backlogue grooming and overall project management needs, watch the overview video.

https://business.adobe.com/fragments/resources/cards/thank-you-collections/workfront