Working with a backlog can be challenging: many product owners and managers know what it means to wrestle with overly long and detailed backlogs.
There are proven practices for a product backlog that help product owners manage it effectively; we’ve described them in the previous post. However, what are the stages that help to work with product backlog items and where to start?
Here we have combined backlog properties and some practical activities that demonstrates how to work with the product backlog effectively.
Essential backlog properties
A product backlog is a set of “what could be done next”, but an effective backlog makes clear what should be done next. In fact, the backlog must be organized in a way that answers the questions stakeholders may ask.
Strategic Backlog
Always keep your strategy in mind and make your product backlog strategic. The roadmap you work on is a specific journey you want to take with your product. It defines choosing the items from the backlog that contribute to the completion of the journey.
Your product strategy must be already designed to the moment, right? So use the strategic categories and their relative impact to groom the backlog to roadmap readiness.
The well-defined strategy will definitely help in product backlog refinement processes and will optimize even the most unwieldy archive of backlog requests.
Accessible Backlog
Make the backlog accessible. Product managers always care about what should be selected next within a long list of typical requests.
Use categories or tagging. It will give you the opportunity to retrieve a certain subset of backlog requests at any time and make the backlog accessible.
Comprising Backlog
Product managers should always remember that the product journey may not just consist of features. It may also include some re-architecture efforts, tech training for the team and other non-feature stuff.
You should include all these items in the backlog and they also should be groomed and reviewed.
Sometimes these non-feature items may indicate large efforts. Pay attention to this and reflect it in the product strategy as a major initiative.
Grooming as the key backlog activity
Groom it permanently
Your product backlog will never look “done”. It is a living asset in your release process that should be constantly revisited. The backlog can quickly become overwhelmed. When it happens, team members can lose focus on important tasks and user stories’ status may become unclear. Troubles with estimating the time and resources may appear.
Use backlog grooming to progress the items contributing to your product strategy in your roadmap.
Backlog grooming is a regular meeting that involves a product manager (or a project manager) and the customer’s representative aimed to break the backlog down into user stories and reprioritize them.
Backlog grooming will help to make sure that the tasks presented in the backlog are relevant and those that are presented at the top of the list are ready for planning in sprint and release.
Actually, the global purpose of this event is to define and propose suggestions for its improvement. These improvements may look like writing new user stories, removing no more relevant ones, adding new features, re-assessing the relative priorities, breaking some user stories down into smaller ones, redefining testing criteria and so on.
Get feedback and analyze it carefully
Your customers, stakeholders, and supporting teams can give you enough info about new reveals and updates that might affect your product. Pay attention to this feedback and analyze it. It’s should be your direct responsibility to manage perspectives and incorporate feedback into a revised product journey.
With every release you manage, a feedback set should be incorporated.
Add categories
After you have identified the categories, tag-incoming backlog items with them. This kind of categorization should identify those who have vested interest in this specific feature. It should enable product managers to define which strategic objective the backlog feature belongs to, who will likely benefit and who will be needed to execute the feature.
Usually, the categorization can be completed by the PO with minimal feedback from others.
Prioritize the items
When your product backlog is categorized with supporting tags, these categories should be prioritized. It means comparing product features to confirm their strategic importance. Here you score your backlog items relative to each other.
Many product managers use popular prioritization techniques and methodologies that help them to define the most important issues and the useless ones.
Ideally, stakeholders should also review prioritization. This should be done on a recurring basis to keep the backlog fresh and responsive to changing market drivers.
Detail items
Backlog items should be also categorized and prioritized for the people who will work with them next. It’s about the development team. That’s why all backlog features must be refined with details and requirements to get them to a “ready” condition.
Invite developers to participate in backlog grooming session, as Agile requires. It will ensure that enough features in the backlog are ready for development.
Every participant during these sessions will be able to ask questions and you will refine the backlog items with stories, requirements, and sufficient breakdown for developers.
Backlog refinement should be detailed and stringent to ensure that development processes are building what matters.
Revisit the backlog
Permanent product backlog grooming processes will help to achieve your product and company goals. You customers’ desires and need is a “headache” as a product manager’s.
Do not forget to revisit lower-scoring features to determine if they should move up in value, as market conditions and requirements evolve constantly. It’s not only about reviewing items as they come in. Revisiting the backlog is also about reviewing the process you’ve established to ensure that all team members achieve their needs from your the backlog.
