Backlog Grooming Isn’t Product Strategy

You’re planning the pit stops. But do you know where you’re actually going?

In my experience the most common confusion in product teams is mistaking motion for direction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in backlog grooming.

What Grooming Gets Right (and Wrong)

To be clear: grooming matters. It’s where delivery gets unblocked, tickets get cleaned up, stories get scoped, and short-term priorities get clarified.

It’s also where a lot of small product decisions happen:

• What goes into the sprint

• What gets cut

• What stories need more clarity

  
  

But here’s the trap: those aren’t the most important product decisions.

They’re decisions about how to build, when to build, and how much to build. Not what to build, why, or for whom. And if product managers spend most of their time in grooming, they’re optimizing execution—not driving strategy.

The Road Trip Analogy

Think of your product like a long road trip.

Backlog grooming is deciding where to stop for gas, what snacks to buy, and who gets the aux cord for this leg of the journey. Necessary? Yes. But it won’t help if no one’s agreed on the destination—or worse, if every stakeholder thinks you're headed somewhere different.

That’s what happens when strategy is missing. Teams keep moving, but no one’s quite sure where they’re going or why. And eventually, someone says, “How did we end up here?”

The Hidden Cost of Tactical Obsession

When PMs live in the backlog, several things happen:

• Stakeholders see progress in tickets, not outcomes

• The roadmap gets filled with tactical requests instead of strategic bets

• Customer insights get stale or surface-level

• Teams lose sight of the larger product vision

It creates a cycle where product management becomes project hygiene. Polished, orderly, and entirely reactive.

Why It Happens

This problem isn’t just about bad habits—it’s often systemic:

• Too many stakeholders throwing features into the backlog

• Engineering-led delivery processes that push PMs toward execution

• A lack of clear strategy from leadership, so the backlog becomes the de facto source of truth

The result? PMs get busy managing the next sprint, not the product.

What to Do Instead

Here’s how to pull your team out of the short-term tunnel and back into product leadership.

1. Create Space for Strategy

If 90% of your product team’s time is spent on sprint-level planning, it’s time to rebalance. Block time for:

• Customer discovery

• Competitive research

• Strategic mapping sessions with leadership

• Defining long-term goals and outcomes

Don’t let grooming be the only time product decisions happen.

2. Reconnect Every Task to an Outcome

Every ticket should ladder up to something that matters:

• Improved onboarding → better activation

• UI improvements → reduced support volume

• Backend refactors → faster iteration speed

If you can’t connect a story to a business or user outcome, it doesn’t belong in the sprint—no matter how groomed it is.

3. Reduce Overhead in Grooming

Not every PM needs to attend every refinement session. Delegate story readiness checks to tech leads or product ops where possible. Free PM time for thinking, not just ticket-tending.

4. Lead with Questions, Not Lists

Instead of starting with: “Is the backlog ready for sprint planning?”Ask:

• “What have we learned about our customers this week?”

• “What’s the next strategic problem we’re solving?”

• “Where are we placing bets for the next quarter?”

  
  

Final Thought: Don’t Let Clean Backlogs Fool You

There’s nothing wrong with having a polished board and well-groomed stories. But if that’s the main thing your product team is optimizing for, you’re missing the point.

Because no amount of grooming can save a product with no direction.

Backlog grooming is about how you drive. Strategy is about where and why.Both matter. But only one will get you to the right destination.