Separate Grooming from Sprint Planning — Create optionality and resiliency to improve your velocity

This is an early excerpt from a book I am working on that I plan to call “Product Snacks”. It will be a concise collection of chapters, each offering practical and accessible advice for product managers and designed to be a desk-side companion, providing quick, digestible tips “snacks” to guide and inspire when you’re seeking clarity or a fresh perspective. I’d love ANY and ALL feedback and if you’d like to collab, let’s chat!

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While it might seem obvious on paper, and indeed that’s how most literature presents it, the practice often deviates. I frequently observe teams attempting to combine grooming and planning in a single session to “save time”. This, however, is an early signal of a dysfunctional team.

Backlog grooming (or refinement) is fundamentally about prioritization, alignment, and sizing, not planning.

This time should be utilized with your entire team (not just your engineering lead) to break down each story. It’s crucial to ensure everyone understands the intent, challenge the story’s current framing, and collaboratively explore the best way to represent the problem or objective. Feedback from the team on potential improvements is invaluable, even if it’s just minor rewording or tweaking the acceptance criteria. Walking through each story as a group fosters understanding, alignment, and provides an opportunity to offer additional context.

A critical aspect of grooming is sizing. As a “freedom within a framework” type of product leader, I don’t advocate for any specific sizing method, as long as you and your team size each story during grooming. A common pitfall is when teams hastily agree with the first or loudest opinion. Each team member should contribute their perspective on size, using any discrepancies as a starting point for further discussion. Differences in sizing often reveal areas needing more alignment or understanding. As a product manager, it’s your role to probe these differences with curiosity and enthusiasm. Remember, there’s often more than one path to DONE DONE, and as the PM, you might not initially see the best ones due to your broader focus — you’re not in it deep enough to see all the solutions.

Grooming provides optionality.

Strive to maintain at least two sprints’ worth of groomed backlog at any given time. This approach allows flexibility for inevitable plan changes. A well-groomed backlog helps your team understand how their current work fits into the larger picture, improving decision-making in the present. Embrace change by having a plan; a deep backlog affords the flexibility needed for agile adaptation. This is a key strategy for maintaining high velocity. Change is inevitable, you can be resilient by having a deep and groomed backlog.

So, why not combine backlog grooming with sprint planning? Simply put, grooming requires time and a different mindset. It’s about understanding future work, not just the immediate next cycle. Effective grooming is time-consuming, and aiming to have two sprints’ worth of groomed backlog is crucial. If you limit grooming to just the upcoming sprint, you risk inadequate preparation, potentially starting sprints with too few stories, and resorting to mid-sprint grooming. Such scenarios lead to rushed adjustments, timeline disruptions, and undue pressure on the team to catch up.