Organizing and prioritizing tasks can be challenging in product development. Agile product management tackles this problem using product backlogs or prioritized to-do lists that guide teams toward their goals.
In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the product backlog, its role in product development and how it can streamline your team’s workflow.
Definition: A product backlog is an ordered list of tasks, features and fixes you must complete for product development. It links the strategic vision of a product roadmap with day-to-day development tasks, helping teams deliver high-value items first.
Traditional product management often relies on rigid long-term plans that don’t adapt easily to changes and feedback. The Agile framework’s solution is the product backlog, a prioritized list that evolves with the project.
The product owner manages the backlog, prioritizing items based on market needs, stakeholder input and insights. Regular refinement keeps the list actionable, ensuring items are ready for development.
A product backlog complements a product roadmap, a high-level strategic outline that defines vision, direction and progress. The roadmap sets the broader context and long-term goals, while the backlog breaks down the tasks needed to achieve them.
Note: Under the Agile framework, a product owner bridges upper management and the development team’s scrum master, ensuring a product adheres to its roadmap. The scrum master, in turn, manages the product development team.
Product backlog example
Imagine a software company that wants to improve its mobile app according to the goals set in the product roadmap. First, it wants to boost user engagement over the next two quarters. To achieve this, it populates the product backlog with several items, including new social features, performance bug fixes and UX improvements.
The development team works through these backlog items during sprints, or short, time-boxed cycles that last one to four weeks. During each sprint, team members complete tasks from the backlog.
Along the way, they gather user feedback and refine upcoming tasks, adjusting priorities to better meet customer needs. Here’s what the process looks like in practice, with colored boxes representing prioritized tasks:
The development team repeats the process, reviewing and adapting the backlog to ensure they stay on track to meet long-term goals while responding to real-time insights. This process drives sales by ensuring customers love your product.
What’s in a product backlog?
A product backlog includes every task that helps a team deliver products. While every company’s backlog is different, they usually have:
New features. Add new functionalities based on user needs or market demands. A scrum product backlog may include “epics”, significant new features or requirements too big to tackle in a single sprint. Instead, a team breaks them down into smaller, manageable tasks.
Enhancements. Improve existing features based on feedback or performance assessments. The goal is to enhance the customer experience and product performance by refining what’s already in place.
Bug fixes. Bug fixes are essential for product service management. They address errors to maintain quality and ensure the product works as expected.
Technical debt. Find areas in the product that need improvement, such as outdated code. Addressing technical debt improves the product’s ongoing maintenance and scalability.
Research or “Spikes”. Spikes are investigative tasks that involve researching or prototyping new features and opportunities.
Infrastructure. Tasks related to setting up the backend systems and processes that support product development. They provide a foundation for functionality and efficiency.
Product owners capture new features and enhancements as “user stories”. These brief descriptions of features from an end user’s view help the development team understand what they’re building and why, acting as building blocks for the product backlog. Here are some examples, organized by priority:
You then break user stories down further into tasks or actionable pieces of work that help teams complete each task.
To use the first user story as an example, the product development team might create these subset tasks:
Research best practices to install a document search feature
Design the document search UI elements
Test the search feature across different devices
Prepare the release notes for the new feature
Download your guide to managing teams and scaling sales
How to create and manage a product backlog
A product backlog is a single source of truth, guiding your team on what to do next. Including the right items in your backlog keeps your development efforts focused.
Reviewing and adjusting your backlog as priorities shift ensures you dedicate resources to the most impactful tasks. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating and managing a product backlog.
1. Create a product roadmap
The product roadmap is the strategic blueprint and foundation for your product backlog. It provides a clear direction on how your product will evolve. To create your product roadmap:
Define your vision. Explain the product vision. What is its ultimate goal? This vision should reflect the needs of end users and align with business objectives.
Understand your product. Gather customer perspectives through workshops, interviews or surveys. Engage with end users to learn about their experiences and issues. Consult your customer support team about common problems and requests.
Identify key milestones. Break down the product vision into achievable milestones or phases. These milestones should align with specific features or business goals, such as launching a new product or releasing a feature.
Be flexible. Leave room for flexibility because adjusting is crucial as you gain insights from market research and user data.
Your product roadmap should outline all planned major releases and high-level features. For example, a software company wants to build an agile project management tool to boost team collaboration and productivity. The team outlines crucial milestones, such as building a prototype and minimum viable product (MVP), in the product roadmap:
2. Detail user stories
With your product roadmap ready, start developing user stories or the features, enhancements and bug fixes that will form your backlog. User stories describe these features from the user’s perspective to help the team understand what to build.
First, divide the roadmap’s high-level features into epics representing broad project areas. Say the software company wants to make live chat a key feature of its product. It might create epics like “Develop the chat interface” and “Implement message notifications”.
Now, create user stories using the format: “As a [user], I want [feature] so that [benefit]”. For the “Develop chat interface” epic, a user story might be: “As a product manager, I want to send and receive messages in real time to communicate with my team”.
Note: If the Agile way of using epics and stories doesn’t work for you, consider using another product development methodology. There are many ways to describe and organize your backlog items, including the waterfall, lean and Kanban methods.
3. Prioritize backlog items
You now have many user stories in your product backlog, ready for prioritization. Prioritizing them is crucial, as well as ensuring your team focuses on the most valuable and impactful work first.
To prioritize your backlog items, collaborate with product owners, managers and end users to gather input on what’s most important from business and user perspectives.
Evaluate each item based on its potential to deliver value or business benefits. For instance, a high-impact item that aligns with your strategic management goals should rank higher than a low-impact item that only affects a few users.
Here are the most critical considerations when prioritizing your backlog items:
Consideration | Why it matters |
Item value | The more value a feature brings to users or the business, the higher its priority should be. Consider value by assessing the potential impact on customer satisfaction and business goals. |
Complexity and effort | Prioritize features that need less effort to deliver value. Assess effort by estimating story points and weighing difficulty against potential benefits. |
Urgency | Items that address immediate issues or opportunities are most important. Analyze market or sales trends, customer feedback and competitive pressures to determine which features need rapid delivery. |
Risks and dependencies | High-risk items or those with dependencies need earlier attention to prevent issues. Use risk assessments and dependency maps to understand how delaying specific tasks could impact project timelines. |
Regulatory compliance requirements | Compliance features are mandatory, and you should prioritize them to avoid legal issues. Review legal obligations and industry standards to identify critical items. |
It’s also important to prioritize a mix of quick wins and long-term strategic tasks. Having some quick wins in the mix helps your team maintain momentum and shows customers you’re working to improve your product.
Note: Story points provide a way for scrum teams to compare tasks against each other in terms of effort. For example, a task estimated at five story points will need more effort than a task estimated at two story points. Unlike time-based estimates, story points focus on the complexity, risks and effort involved in a piece of work, rather than how much time they’ll take.
4. Break down stories into actionable tasks
After creating and prioritizing your user stories, it’s time to break them down into concrete tasks for your team. Here’s what to do:
Steps | Work Items |
Analyze user stories | Examine each story and determine the specific actions needed to make it happen. Cover all aspects, from design to deployment. |
Define specific tasks | Break down user stories into smaller components. Each task should be clear and achievable within a sprint (usually a few hours, days or weeks). |
Collaborate with the team | Involve the development team when breaking down stories into tasks. Use everyone’s collective understanding to ensure they know what to do. |
Estimate effort | Assign time estimates or story points to each task to help with planning. |
Ensure completeness | Ensure you’ve identified all necessary tasks, including any dependencies. |
For a user story like the product manager example above, the tasks might be:
Design the chat user interface
Set up real-time messaging in the backend
Test real-time text messaging
Write user documentation
Once you’ve created a list of actionable tasks, it’s time to assign and execute them.
5. Plan and execute your tasks
Planning and executing sprints involves organizing each task into short, time-boxed cycles. Sprints or similar time-bound processes help your team focus on manageable tasks and ensure consistent progress.
Here are the steps:
Start planning. Hold a sprint planning meeting and choose high-priority items to complete. Consider the team’s capacity and set a realistic amount of work.
Define the sprint goal and timeframe. Establish a clear, achievable goal guiding the team’s initiatives throughout the sprint. Set a realistic timeframe, such as a single workday or week.
Hold daily stand-ups. Conduct short scrum meetings where team members share progress updates and plan daily tasks.
Monitor progress. Use tools like a sprint board or burndown chart to track progress, identify bottlenecks and adjust work.
Sprint review and retrospective. Hold a meeting to review completed work at the end of each sprint. Discuss what went well, what didn’t and how to improve processes for the next sprint.
Continuing with the product backlog management example, the team plans a two-week sprint to install the real-time chat feature. If a developer encounters challenges, the team brainstorms solutions immediately.
At the end of the sprint, they show the chat feature to stakeholders, who provide feedback and suggest adding a message search function in future iterations. The team agrees to incorporate these changes into the next sprint to refine chat capabilities.
6. Refine and repeat
Product development continues until the product is off the market. Refine your backlog and maintain momentum to meet customer expectations and deliver value.
Update priorities, refine user stories and add insights to your backlog. Create new user stories for emerging needs, ensuring they’re well-defined and prioritized for upcoming sprints.
This iterative process ensures your team reviews and enhances the product, supporting steady progress as the market evolves.
3 best practices to improve your product backlog
An effective product backlog helps you manage work and deliver better customer outcomes. Here are three best practices that streamline your workflows:
1. Use backlog grooming to keep your backlog up-to-date
Backlog grooming, or product backlog refinement, involves reviewing and updating your backlog to keep items well-defined, prioritized and ready for development. It helps maintain a clear, organized backlog ready for sprint planning. To get the most out of product backlog grooming:
Set dedicated times for refinement sessions, at least once per sprint
Check that user stories are clear, concise and follow the proper format
Ensure each story has acceptance criteria that provide clear metrics for completion
Reassess product backlog items according to the latest business needs and feedback
Pay close attention to dependencies to avoid surprises that impact completion
Clean up the sprint backlog by removing outdated or low-priority items that no longer matter
If you perform these actions during each sprint, your team will complete backlog items efficiently and avoid tasks that no longer align with strategic product goals.
2. Try different prioritization techniques
Effective backlog prioritization focuses your team on the most impactful work, optimizing time and resource management. The first technique to try is the MoSCoW prioritization method, or “Must have, Should have, Could have and Won’t have”.
The MoSCoW method has four priority levels:
Must have. Items that are critical for project success.
Should have. Important but not vital; you can defer these without significant impact.
Could have. Desirable but not necessary. Adds value if time and resources are available.
Won’t have. Not a priority for the current period, but you could revisit it later.
Another prioritization technique is a Value vs. Effort matrix. This matrix plots features in a grid based on the value they provide compared to the effort they need:
Quick wins are high-value, low-effort items to prioritize first
Major projects are high-value, high-effort items that are worth completing
Fill-ins are low-value, low-effort items to complete when there’s nothing else to do
Time sinks are low-value, high-effort items to avoid
Here’s what that looks like:
3. Leverage the right technology
Two types of software help product management teams most: customer relationship management (CRM) and project management software. They streamline processes and automate tasks while helping you collaborate and track progress.
While Pipedrive is primarily a CRM, it has several project management features that streamline product workflows:
Customer feedback collection. Gather and organize feedback from different sources like emails or surveys to understand user needs.
Lead and contact management. Maintain detailed records of customer interactions to identify common pain points or feature requests. Use Pipedrive’s contact management feature to track customer history in detail and align product development with user expectations.
Analytics and reporting. Pipedrive’s reporting features give powerful insights into customer behavior and preferences, aiding strategic decision-making about product features and prioritization.
Task management and tracking. Pipedrive’s Projects add-on organizes and assigns tasks within the backlog to specific team members. Tracking tasks gives you more visibility into progress and workload distribution.
Collaboration tools. Pipedrive encourages seamless team communication and information sharing with shared project views and hundreds of integrations.
Workflow automation. Automate repetitive processes to save time and reduce errors. Pipedrive automates follow-up emails and updates, helping streamline backlog task management.
Timeline and milestone tracking. Pipedrive’s timeline views and visual pipelines allow your Agile teams to monitor progress against project milestones and ensure timely delivery.
Here’s Pipedrive’s Projects add-on with its easy-to-follow layout:
Final thoughts
A product backlog is a living document – your team’s go-to list for all tasks, features and fixes. It helps prioritize what adds the most value. Creating an effective backlog involves gathering user stories, prioritizing them, breaking them down into manageable tasks and refining the backlog list to align with goals.
Tools like Pipedrive streamline this process, helping you manage your backlog. Sign up for a free trial to see how Pipedrive can enhance your product management processes.
