No single person is responsible for backlog refinement. It's an ongoing activity that everyone from the product owner, product manager, and development team can—and should—do at any time.
However, a backlog-refinement meeting is a different matter. This specific meeting tends to happen two to three days before the end of a sprint, and is run by a project manager, product managers, or scrum leader.
No matter who’s leading, running an effective backlog grooming session means:
Making sure all relevant team members can attend
Creating and executing a meeting agenda
Keeping the meeting on track and as short as possible
Encouraging everyone to participate
Reviewing all backlog items and relevant metrics
Writing and revising user stories
Updating priorities and estimates
Tracking action items and sending follow-ups
Attendees at backlog-refinement meetings typically include team members who have critical details about user stories, estimates, and items to prioritize. Those can include:
Product owner(s)
Scrum master
Development team
Because collaboration is so vital to effective backlog management, you need to implement processes and tools that keep everyone on the same page about progress. Using software that reflects changes in real-time, like Airtable, is considered a best practice among successful product teams.
At the top of the list for backlog grooming best practices? Regularity.
An important first step is to set a regular cadence for backlog grooming. Making this a collaborative effort with your whole product team. Hold a grooming session at least once per sprint (in preparation for the next sprint) and pull in everyone involved in the product's development.
There are more ways to help your team make the best of backlog management. Roman Pichler's DEEP acronym offers an engaging summary:
Detailed appropriately: give your product backlog's higher-priority items more detail than the lower-priority ones
Estimated: the product owner should ensure all items in the backlog have some estimate the time (or effort) required, whether that’s story points or days
Emergent: a product backlog is never static; expect to add, remove, or modify items on the backlog based on emerging feedback from customers and users
Prioritized: put the most important items at the top and do those things first
Oh, and one more recommendation: use the right tools for the job.
Just as there are tools to help with high-level project management, there are also excellent tools for your product and backlog management. A relational database like Airtable helps you manage your product development workflow, keep your backlog items and data up-to-date, and provide your stakeholders with custom views to suit their needs.
Every sprint brings a new set of challenges for a product team. While rising to those challenges is part of what makes product management fun, it's also hard work bringing a product vision to life.
Backlog refinement is one of those small rituals along the way that pays dividends in the end. It lets your team work quickly and efficiently and brings managers peace of mind.
Now that you know more about backlog grooming, it’s time to check if your current tool stack makes backlog management easier. If it doesn't measure up, check out Airtable. With Airtable, you can create the perfect agile workflow for your backlog, or plan sprints, standups, and more, in a single relational database. Kick things off with our product templates, or learn how to design a backlog within your existing roadmap.
About the author
Airtable's Product Teamis committed to building world-class products, and empowering world-class product builders on our platform.
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