What is a product backlog in scrum? Overview for agile teams LogRocket Blog
We’ve all heard of ‘scope creep’, and a backlog is a great way to actually visualize this phenomenon in action. This is called “tech debt.” It’s like cleaning a messy room bit by bit. A backlog is a list of things you must, should, could, or would like to do. Effective March 1, 2024, select membership levels will see a slight increase in dues, a change from our temporary reduction during the COVID-19 pandemic to support our community. A backlog can serve several essential functions for an organization.
In short, a product backlog is the ultimate guide for smooth project sailing. It helps everything stay in order, strengthens clear lines of communication, and keeps everyone motivated. Like a trusty map or compass, it ensures the journey goes right. The product backlog helps everyone know their unique role and when they should jump into action. Backlog maintenance is a team effort where the whole product team gives ideas and helps update the list. The product backlog communicates with your team what to do next.
As your team prioritizes tasks with guidance from the product owner, they’ll also determine how much work they can commit to in a specified block of time. 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. The product roadmap is the foundation for the product backlog.
- That often gets in the way of collaboration because it becomes a service-provider relationship.
- The sequence of product backlog items on a product backlog changes as a team gains a better understanding of the outcome and the identified solution.
- Although there is no official backlog refinement event, agile teams often find it helpful to set aside time to review the backlog together.
- A key responsibility of the product manager is to maintain 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. A product backlog is an ordered list of tasks, features, or items to be completed as part of a larger roadmap. This helps set expectations with stakeholders and other teams, especially when they bring additional work to you, and makes engineering time a fixed asset. There are myriad ways to structure your product, release, and sprint backlogs. In many cases, depending on what tool you use, it may be advantageous to either tag or organize your backlog in a certain way.
What belongs in the product backlog?
The product backlog is a key component in Agile methodology, serving as a dynamic, organized list of work items that the team needs to address. These items, often referred to as user stories, are ordered based on their priority to deliver value to the end-user. To ensure that you’re sticking to the sprint schedule, you’ll want to track the progress of those sprints.
It represents an option the team has for delivering a specific outcome rather than a commitment. In addition to these tactical benefits, you can hold periodic grooming sessions. Grooming sessions are an excellent opportunity to bring the entire cross-functional team together to ensure everyone is working toward a standard set of strategic goals. When you have an anchor document to facilitate these cross-functional alignment discussions, it is yet another reason that every product team should develop and maintain a backlog. We’ve outlined backlog grooming even further in this video below.
Sprint backlogs are a subset of the product backlog, but they’re used specifically during sprints. A product backlog helps your team run like a well-oiled machine by improving organization and collaboration. It becomes the central tool for communication and keeps everyone aligned on goals and expectations. Communication between team members is a crucial part of product backlog prioritization. To successfully sort through the backlog and complete items in a reasonable time frame, you and your team must work together and follow the Scrum guide. Agile teams work in focused sprints to complete work, and this method is highly effective for productivity.
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. Take the list of requirements and determine which are the most important, somewhat important and least important. Keep the goal of the project in mind, assess the requirements and determine which must be included and which is not important to the final deliverable.
What is the difference between product roadmap and product backlog?
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Instead, the development team pulls work from the product backlog as there is capacity for it, either continually (kanban) or by iteration (scrum). Like the product and release backlogs, the sprint backlog is emergent. The sprint backlog can change during the sprint if necessary to achieve the sprint goal. The sprint backlog is created during sprint planning, where the team decides what to take into the current sprint from the product backlog and determines how the team intends to deliver it. The farther a backlog items projects into the future, the more likely they are to be removed, altered, or changed based on new information, market changes, customer feedback, etc. Therefore we want to minimize the time invested into refining these items where possible.
How to Make and Use a Sprint Backlog
All the work the developers are doing is visible on the sprint backlog. The sprint goal the team commits to must be contained in a single place where everyone can see it, such as at the top of the sprint backlog. Although I named user stories a type of product backlog item, each team can choose what fits them best. In summary, the sprint backlog contains what the team will focus on during the sprint cycle. It’s often a subset of the product backlog focused on reaching the sprint goal.
Product teams will update the backlog accordingly as they gain a better understanding and uncover new information. This may result in adding new backlog items, removing items, updating the priority of backlog items, or even further refining an item to go into greater detail. The intent behind a backlog is to create a single source of truth for the priority https://intuit-payroll.org/ of work the product team plans to complete during a given period of time. The product backlog is the single authoritative source for things that a team works on. That means that nothing gets done that isn’t on the product backlog. Conversely, the presence of a product backlog item on a product backlog does not guarantee that it will be delivered.
Optional techniques like size or story point estimation can help teams understand their capacity and construct realistic sprint backlogs. Sizing and estimation techniques are not part of the scrum framework, so your scrum team can choose any technique you all find helpful. During the sprint planning event, the scrum team commits to a sprint goal — the “why” of their sprint. This is a single objective and a stepping stone toward the product goal. For example, software engineers commonly create tech debt items and designers point out usability glitches.
What is Backlog Grooming?
Likewise, if a backlog is ignored, it morphs into a cluttered, confusing mess that hurts a project’s progress rather than helps. Just like certain chores must be done before others, the product backlog points out which tasks are important to tackle first. That’s where the product backlog comes in, helping to keep everything organized and reel in chaos should a project fly off the rails.
For example, if you’re launching a new online store, setting up a safe way for customers to pay is more important than picking colors for the site. However, creating and maintaining an effective backlog isn’t without challenges. Kevin Morris talks about the importance of not overly focusing on the inward-facing components of product management.
