Engineering Program Manager

backlog-grooming · Business & Product

Cut a backlog to the issues a team will actually act on this sprint, without losing a real regression.

How the worker got there 4.1s · 4 steps
  1. 1 Cluster duplicates Gemini 3 Pro 640ms

    MOB-1247, MOB-1198 and MOB-1302 describe the same crash from three angles — the stack traces differ but all three land in the same payments call. Grouping them.

  2. 2 Classify severity Claude Opus 4.8 1180ms

    Reporter marked it P1. This team’s rubric reserves P1 for revenue-blocking, and none of the three mention revenue — so P2. Not applying that rule to other teams.

  3. 3 Check for a regression Claude Opus 4.8 910ms

    MOB-1302 cites a commit SHA and a version that worked. That makes it a regression, not a duplicate report — pulling it back out of the cluster and escalating.

  4. 4 Draft the consolidation Claude Opus 4.8 1340ms

    One issue for MOB-1247 + MOB-1198, links back to both. Left MOB-1302 open and tagged it for the EM.

Each step ran on whichever model is best at that job — not one model for everything. The worker is the workflow.

Permissions & guardrails
  • Read: issues, labels, commit history and the team’s own severity rubric — only on the boards it was added to
  • Write: comments and labels only; a proposed consolidation is left as a suggestion, never written into an issue body
  • Escalate: the EM when a suspected duplicate cites a commit SHA, or when the rubric and an existing label disagree
  • Never: close, reopen or reassign an issue without a human approving the change first
  • Never: act on a board it wasn’t explicitly granted, even when a linked issue points to one