Grooming is mentoring about a topic/subject. Product grooming is mentoring about the features of the product to be developed. Engineering team knows how to develop, but product manager should groom them why to develop? and What to develop? Product grooming plays vital role in shaping up the product per expectation. Product grooming is organized by product manager/product owner.

Product planning is organized by scrum master to estimate engineering efforts. Product team and engineering team meets to understand the complexity and severity, estimating efforts based on capacity to derive the duration.

Product grooming and planning meetings bridge the gap between product and engineering teams, they works as a platform to understand each other’s concerns. They helps both the teams to be on the same page in terms of functionality, technology challenges, customer expectation, feasibility, and complexity. Product grooming is organized by product manager or a product owner per Agile methodology.

Business case

Business case is something which supports why the feature should be developed? The feature to be developed must not be just a task statement. However, letting know the importance, advantage, and the business impact involved for implementing the feature will explain why the feature is going to be developed. For instance, you advised a person that do exercise regularly may not motivate the person. However, if you explain the advantages like 1. You will be healthy 2. It burns the unwanted fat 3. Your face will glow 4. Your stamina will get increased.

These points indeed motivates him to start the exercise. So, instead of assigning a feature with little explanation of functionality, explain with a business case so that the feature will be shaped up far more better than the expectation.

Functional flow

Flow is the steam or a movement, how the functional flow moves and impact other functionality, it represents in a diagram. Functional flow helps engineering team to understand the impact on other functionality, modification of other functionality, changes of the existing functionality so that the new functionality will be developed without deviating the existing functionality.

Impact on the business

Knowing the impact of the business helps to prioritize the feature. Engineering team should understand the business involved with each feature, how it impacts to gain the market share, the impact of customer satisfaction, the impact on revenue, the impact on competition, and the impact on overall performance. Understanding the prioritization and business impact will indeed helps getting adequate support from engineering team to meet the deadline.

User stories

User story is a tool which is being widely used in Agile methodology to develop the functionality. Majority of the cases a feature or an epic is far more bigger than a user story. That is why each feature breaks down into smaller user stories. What is a user story? The user story is a small part of a feature which consists of 1. ‘Title’ what to be developed 2. ‘Description’ which describes the background 3. ‘Steps’ which indicate the detailed implementation step by step 4. ‘Functional flow’ which defines the flow of functionality and the impact on other features 5. ‘Exit criteria’ which define the completion of the user story.

Product planning

Product planning is a meeting organized by scrum master, he/she invites both the product and engineering teams to discuss about the effort, estimation, timelines. It should be organized for each sprint to plan per Agile methodology. Usually, the topics to be discussed in the product planning is : Challenges, how many user stories are clear, how many are considered for the current sprint, and the user stories to be moved to next sprint. Product planning is a right forum for product manager to negotiate, compel all the teams and plan further to get the features implemented.

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Better way for product backlog and grooming