The Leanest Way To Organize Your Product Backlog
One of the most important tasks – but unfortunately one of the least popular – for product managers is organizing the product backlog. Staying on top of all those ideas is the only way to continually push the best ones to the top. But when you fall behind on maintenance, it can (and will) spiral out of control.
*sigh*It’s our least favorite tasks that generally require the most discipline. That’s why we’ve put together a few tips for helping you tackle your product backlog in a manageable, and even therapeutic way.
Step 1: Pick a date
Pick a regular time to prune your backlog. We do it once a month – so pick a date and time of day (we recommend a full morning or afternoon) that’s the least likely to get pushed around by other *urgent* needs.
Step 2: Cull it all
This is your turbo-charged attack on your backlog. You’re aiming for a quick, but thorough scan of all ideas to remove or merge irrelevant and duplicate entries. We recommend doing this to an inspirational, powerful playlist.
Step 3: Find the holes
Identify the ideas that are held in stasis because they are missing information. As this is a monthly activity, pay close attention to those ideas you know you haven’t touched during the past month. This might be business case, user case or even a simple detailing of what problem the feature should address.
Step 4: Write up a to-do list
Once you’ve identified everything that needs attention, don’t just leave it there. From the ideas you’ve selected create follow-up tasks and add them to whatever to-do list you already manage. Make these specific and realistic so that you don’t find yourself picking out and noting down the same unfinished backlog chores next month too.
Step 5: Smugly celebrate
As well as actually cracking on with that to do list – we recommend making you REWARD YOURSELF. That was long an arduous thing you just did. When backlog day comes around, make sure you’ve got a treat stocked in the office that you can congratulate yourself with when you finish. Candy. Ice cream sandwich. Whiskey. Whatever floats your boat.
This exercise was taken from the ProdPad Handy Guide for Product People. Sign up for a free trial and request your own copy for plenty more tips and tricks for great product management.
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2 thoughts on "The Leanest Way To Organize Your Product Backlog"
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Number 4 is a great one that is often missed and done later as the time to start development approaches not leaving enough time to do a proper analysis of the item.
It is very common to have a very long backlog of features that is nearly impossible to prioritize effectively by comparing the relative importance of one feature or improvement against every other one. I recommend
1. grouping items by themes,
2. prioritizing the issues within each theme,
3. prioritizing the themes and selecting the most important features in that slice of the backlog to do first
As a bonus you get the team to focus on related functionality in each sprint instead of looking at many different disconnected features. This usually saves time and leads to better design and overall UX.
Hi Ramon, I think you’re absolute right. Product Managers have to prioritize quite ruthlessly and then focus on fleshing out the right ideas into final product specs so that they can keep the development queue stacked with work that’ll actually improve the product.
I like your way of grouping them into themes first, and tackling from there. That can be done using our roadmap format, where each ‘card’ on the roadmap is a theme. Those themes should be linked to your KPIs or overall success criteria for your product. Doing so helps ensure you’re focusing on the right ideas rather than getting lost in your product backlog.
Thanks for your insight!