Sequential Grooming is the standard grooming pattern for most BMAD stories. Rather than activating all personas simultaneously, you pass the story through each relevant persona in a fixed sequence — typically PM → Architect → Developer — each reviewing from their own perspective and producing focused feedback before the next begins. The story accumulates refinements at each pass until it satisfies all personas.
The sequence order matters. The PM reviews first because PM changes — expanding or clarifying scope — may invalidate what the Architect would say. The Architect reviews second because architecture constraints affect how the Developer reads the implementation steps. The Developer reviews last because implementation-level observations should not drive changes to scope or architecture. Reversing the sequence produces feedback that doesn't compose cleanly.
Sequential Grooming makes poor use of time if every persona finds significant issues — that is a signal to restart the story with a Party Mode session. Sequential Grooming is appropriate when you can identify in advance which dimension of the story is most likely to contain ambiguity: a story that is clearly scoped but architecturally uncertain needs only PM confirmation and an Architect review, not a full Party Mode.