What Is a Product Backlog in Scrum? Scrum Alliance

The backlog is the foundation for the team’s ability to work in sprints, focusing on increments of work at a time. It allows for flexible, evolving, just-in-time planning, it supports collaboration and discussion, and it enables the scrum team’s ability to focus on a set of high-value items for a defined period of time. The product owner needs to make sure that work is clearly understood by everyone. However, this doesn’t mean that every little detail needs to be documented.

LogRocket simplifies workflows by allowing Engineering, Product, UX, and Design teams to work from the same data as you, eliminating any confusion about what needs to be done. Unlike waterfall projects, it’s not a place to drop extensive requirements and demand people to deliver them. Many teams encourage stakeholders to create tickets in the product backlog. That often gets in the way of collaboration because it becomes a service-provider relationship. In this guide, we’ll help you understand what a product backlog is, review common traps for agile teams to avoid, and define who is accountable for backlog prioritization.

How does good product backlog management help your team stay agile?

The Developers who will be doing the work are responsible for the sizing. The Product Owner may influence the Developers by helping them understand and select trade-offs. One Product Backlog is used to describe the upcoming work on the product. In many cases, these lender what is the average employee retention rate by industry backlogs resulted in situations where delinquent borrowers were able to remain in their homes for several years without making any mortgage payments. The housing recovery did not begin in earnest until such backlogs were mostly cleared. Enhance your sprint reviews with Atlassian’s comprehensive 3-step guide.

Provide a single source of truth for the team’s planned work.

1. The Product Owner oversees and administers the backlog, ensuring transparency, alignment with project objectives, and continual refinement.
2. The team may also get hung up on how to use the tool rather than selecting the process that works best for them.
3. The backlog contents, format, and type are determined by backlog guidelines.
4. A user story is a way to express the work from a user’s point of view, which can be a valuable way to communicate the work to all team members.
5. It is an ever-evolving list of action items, some of which may be removed further down the line, replaced with more pertinent activities.

These will vary in complexity, but owners will need to elaborate on them as they approach the top of the list and become action items. Product Backlog is a prioritized to-do list that comes after you paint the bigger picture with a Product Roadmap. It simplifies complex ideas by breaking them into more digestible parts. The term backlog is used to indicate the existing workload that exceeds the production capacity of a firm or department, often used in construction or manufacturing.

Moreover, they can mitigate any conflicts, dependencies, or advanced work required. With a well-maintained backlog, the contents of any sprint will rarely be the first time the team has encountered the item and its requirements. Agile’s primary strengths lie in rapidly delivering value to customers. Quick iterations and deployment of new functionality and enhancements keep the focus squarely on delighting customers.

What is a product backlog?

It may, for example, refer to a company’s sales orders waiting to be filled or a stack of financial paperwork, such as loan applications, that needs to be processed. Fostering discussion around what’s important gets everyone’s priorities in sync. These discussions foster a culture of group prioritization ensuring everyone shares the same mindset on the program.

For example, within the software development realm, teams leverage backlog item estimation to dissect intricate features into manageable tasks, thus paving a clearer path towards project finalization. Moreover, in the domain of marketing, collaborative endeavors among haircut and margin team members to refine backlog priorities result in more focused campaigns and successful product launches. Teams can use the product backlog to avoid wasting time debating whether an option is valuable or not based on limited information.

This happens if a team adds every idea that gets suggested for addressing the long-term assets definition and meaning outcome but never explores the ideas or removes the items that won’t be delivered. Product backlogs can also grow to an unmanageable size if all large product backlog items are split into smaller product backlog items too far in advance of when the team will work on them. A team owns its product backlog and may have a specific role – product owner – with the primary responsibility for maintaining the product backlog. Once the team chooses the roadmap, the backlog serves as a source for specific development items. The tasks are most beneficial to achieving the objectives and goals of each theme. The product team may consider related backlog items for individual sprints and more significant epics.