Watch a live demo and Q&A session to help you streamline goal-setting, accelerate annual planning, and automate how teams intake strategic work. Read on to find out what a product backlog includes and how to create one for your team. A backlog’s utility lies in the accuracy and volume of its contents and how that enables the product team to prioritize future work. It is the master repository of every valid request, idea, and possibility for the product, product extensions, or even entirely new offerings. Generally, a team refines the items at the top of the list first, working their way down as time allows.
- That said, a theme-based visual roadmap is not just a list of backlog items slated for each upcoming release.
- Prioritization is the backbone of effective product backlog management.
- It provides a clear, transparent view of priorities, making sure the team is always working on tasks that drive the most value.
- Daily sprint reviews and stand-up meetings ensure everyone knows what each team member is working on and help identify bottlenecks in the team.
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The team then sets realistic deadlines for the deliverables and task completion. Sprint planning meetings are the perfect time to discuss backlog items with your team. The sprint backlog’s scope is the subset of product backlog items included in the sprint. The team uses the product backlog and their current workload to determine which tasks are feasible to complete within the sprint’s timeframe. If it’s too large, it’s broken into smaller tasks and executed understanding variable cost vs fixed cost across multiple sprints. Engaging in regular and thorough backlog refinement sessions with the project team can facilitate improved alignment and prioritization of tasks.
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A view into the backlog can also provide a preview of what’s to come. It allows technical teams to begin thinking about how they might implement those items. Moreover, they can mitigate any conflicts, dependencies, or advanced work required.
An essential component of managing the product backlog is prioritizing tasks. As the Scrum master, you should have a thorough understanding of what new features stakeholders want to see in the product. When an agile product team gets together to plan the work for its next sprint, the output of this sprint planning meeting will be the sprint backlog. Then the group will pull the items from this sprint backlog from the more extensive, more comprehensive product backlog.
Prioritization of items
By keeping a backlog, teams can readily identify upcoming work and make well-informed decisions regarding task prioritization based on business value. This not only ensures that the most valuable tasks are addressed first but also facilitates improved resource allocation and planning. The backlog plays a pivotal role in task monitoring by offering a centralized platform where team members can review and oversee the progress of each item.
For example, a new feature may require the user to perform several steps. The functionality required for each step could be turned into tasks (with subtasks added for more complex steps). Business needs and objectives determine the priority of items in the product backlog.
As the product manager, you’ll use epics to guide your product roadmap and backlog list items. As you can see with this example, one epic can result in multiple user stories and product features. Your team may feel inclined to complete simple tasks first so they can remove them from the product backlog and shorten the list, but this is a less efficient form of project management. The product backlog will continue to grow, so tackling complex tasks first is often the most effective.
For example, suppose a theme for a coming sprint is simplifying the checkout process. Once the product backlog is built, it’s important to regularly maintain it to keep pace with the program. Product owners should review the backlog before each iteration planning meeting to ensure prioritization is correct and feedback from the last iteration has been incorporated. Regular review of the backlog is often called “backlog grooming” in agile circles (some use the term backlog refinement). The Product Owner (PO) is the key figure responsible for owning and managing the product backlog.
Your team should create a roadmap first, which will then serve as the action plan for how your product will change as it develops. The roadmap is the vision for long-term product development, but it can also evolve. You create a product backlog from the product roadmap, which explains the plan of action for the product’s evolution. Developers use the tasks in the product backlog to get to their desired outcomes as quickly as possible. Product backlog items vary in size and extent of detail based in large part on how soon a team will work on them.