7 Powerful Practices for a Product Backlog
A product backlog is a set of requirements formulated in the form of development tasks. This set of tasks have no value if it does not bring any system or structure optimization. The product backlog usually includes a bird’s-eye view of the project the team is working on.
Where does the backlog receive all these requirements and ideas from?
- customer support
- product analytics
- rivals analysis
- interviews
- experiments and A/B testing
- reviews
- UX testing
- surveys, etc.
Managing product backlog is not always an easy thing even for experienced PM and PO. It contains a list of user stories that describe the various features that need to develop. Besides user stories the backlog may include the following:
- Epics — longer and more detailed user stories.
- Technical debts.
- Bugs — different defects that need to be resolved.
- Prototypes — proof of concepts that help to make decisions regarding which functionalities should be included or not.
Let’s define two main purposes of product backlogs:
- to capture any changes in the requirements. It’s about including new features and removing existing ones.
- to ensure that the team correlates their efforts with the business goals.
The product backlog should be permanently reviewed and updated by the product owner. So how to manage and improve it to get product success?
Here’re some proven practices that will help product owners manage backlog effectively.
7 good practices for backlogs proven over time
Strategy is your foundation
Before thinking about best ways to optimize product backlog be sure that your product strategy is well defined. The strategy is a background for the product life cycle. It should include a clear direction to guide all team members about your product value.
A well-described product strategy is the way to realize your vision.
Keeping it manageable
The items in the backlog may grow rapidly. If you have 100+ tasks, it will look uncontrolled and hopeless, right? It will be hard to manage them and create transparency.
That’s why, try to avoid this. If it happened, there are some solutions — they will be described below.
Release focusing
Try to always focus your backlog on the upcoming release. It should be also a strategy where all product details, epics and user stories that have to be implemented are described. All the issues connected with the longer-term growth of the product should be fixed in the product roadmap.
The smart roadmap is the way you want to take your product on and a kind of basement for successful backlog management.
The roadmap helps to state the upcoming releases with their goals or benefits. It will ensure that the backlog is aligned with the global product strategy. Popular platforms and product management services that develop roadmaps emphasize the usability of the tool for the entire team. Here some roadmap examples presented by Hygger, Productplan and Aha:
Roadmap example 1
Roadmap example 2
Roadmap example 3
Review your roadmap regularly and adjust it. If you work in Agile, you know that changes are likely to occur. Do not forget to update the product roadmap every 3–5 weeks. It depends on how dynamic the market is and young is your product.
Collaboration is the power
A product manager should always keep doors open and collaborate with the development team. All team members should be involved in the product backlog discussions. It will help to recognize risks and dependencies, to increases the understanding and get clearer requirements. It’s also important to set clear communication with stakeholders to get their feedback and with customers during testing.
Backlog refinement
Backlog refinement or grooming is a special product meeting that involves product owners, product or project managers and a customer’s representative aimed to break the backlog down into user stories and reprioritize them.
As we already know, any product backlog consists of the list of user stories. This list can quickly become overwhelmed. The only way to get success is to groom it. This refinement process should be arranged regularly and be based on a deep analysis and clear acts. It’s a good idea to groom and refine the backlog in collaboration with the developers.
Actually, the aim of this process is to increase the chances of creating a product that your users really want and keeps the backlog up to date. It assists to analyze the feedback timely and apply new insights, remove unnecessary items and add new, work with priorities, break some user stories down into smaller ones, review time and personal estimates and so on.
Detailing the items
All the features in your backlog must be refined with details and requirements to get them to a “ready” state. It will clarify them for development. The process of detailing can be arranged during the backlog grooming session. It will ensure that enough features in the backlog are ready for development. It is optimal for the backlog to contain elements for 2–3 sprints.
Prioritization
Prioritizing the product backlog is one more key to keep it manageable. When and why is prioritization needed?
You’ve created a great product and now have many ideas from your customers, stakeholders and team members. And you get many more ideas than you have time to implement them.
Your goal is to decide how soon a specific item should be implemented. If you address uncertain items early, it will allow testing the ideas and learning how to continue.
Simple and complex approaches
Nowadays, the product manager’s arsenal can be staffed with the most reliable and proven methodologies for prioritization. These famous prioritization techniques help to quickly understand the accumulation of tasks and lead to results.
You, surely, know a lot about some of them: Kano model, MoSCoW prioritization technique, KJ methodology, RICE model, Value vs Cost, Story Mapping, etc. They all differ in complexity, creativity, and focus, but their goal is to help managers and teams to separate the important from the unnecessary.
In case you are not familiar with such techniques, it is better to begin to learn prioritization, studying something simple and clear.
The Lean prioritization technique is one of the simplest and most accessible approaches that helps product managers manage the backlog, especially if it needs to be done quickly and efficiently.
In fact, effective priority management is the process of balancing between the delivery of value and the available resources.
The Lean prioritization method contains a 2×2 matrix as a basement. It helps in making decisions and determines what is important, what is risky, and what direction you need to move. Entrepreneurs in start-ups also actively use this matrix to determine the priority of product development.
This matrix is used to determine the priorities because it can help product managers quickly put things in order.
We have already learned clearly that if not update and maintain the backlog in a normal state; it can quickly become a “dump” for dozens, hundreds and even thousands of features and bugs.
Naturally, it will be more difficult to prioritize if the timely definition of unacceptable features is ignored. They will just be overlooked.
To work with the matrix, you can use a large board and simply draw a large plus sign “+” on it, specify the directions of the Value and Effort axes and place the tasks that meet these criteria.
Comparing the combination of Value and Efforts of each task will help you prioritize the tasks better and choose the most important tasks for development.
- Value assessment will show which business value the feature can bring to your product or your business.
- Efforts measure the resources needed to complete the task.
You may find this useful matrix in a backlog priority chart, designed by Hygger.io:
As mentioned earlier, the backlog should be transparent for all stakeholders and team members.
All right, it seems that now you know the most important things about the product backlog and some ways to improve it. I hope that this post will help you to empower your product management backlog skills and accelerate success easily!
