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What is a product backlog and how do I groom it?

A product backlog is the single, priority-ordered list of everything the team might build — features, bugs, improvements. Grooming, also called refinement, is the recurring habit of keeping its top well-defined: clarify the next sprint's worth of items, estimate them, split oversized ones, and delete what no longer matters.

One list, ruthlessly ordered

The backlog's power is the ordering: position is the priority. The moment work lives in three places — a doc of ideas, a sheet of bugs, a chat of promises — prioritisation becomes politics. Everything competes in one list, and the top of that list is by definition what happens next.

Groom the top, ignore the bottom

Only the top one or two sprints' worth needs real definition: clear titles, enough description to estimate, story points. Items further down can stay one-liners, because detailing item ninety-four is waste — by the time it surfaces, everything around it will have changed. Thirty minutes weekly is enough for most small teams.

Deleting is grooming

A backlog that only grows becomes a guilt museum. If an item has sat un-pulled for months and still stirs no urgency, delete it; if it matters, it will come back with better evidence attached. A useful heuristic: past a hundred open items, do a review-and-delete pass before adding more.

Backlog mechanics in Flocci Projects

The backlog holds every issue not scoped into a sprint, each typed as Task, Bug, Feature, Improvement or Epic, with priority and optional points. Sprint planning drags from its top. The AI breakdown feeds well-formed drafts in, and Epics let related issues roll up so the list stays scannable at altitude.

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Related questions

Who owns the backlog?

One person — a founder, product manager or tech lead — owns the ordering, informed by the team. Committee-ordered backlogs converge on everything-is-priority-one, which means nothing is.

How is a backlog different from a to-do list?

Ordering and estimation. A to-do list records tasks; a backlog ranks all candidate work by value and carries size estimates, so 'what next' and 'how much fits in a sprint' both have data-backed answers.

How often should we groom?

Weekly, thirty minutes, standing agenda: clarify, estimate, split, delete. Skipping grooming does not save the time — it moves it into sprint planning, where it costs the whole team at once.

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