How to effectively manage a product backlog?

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for the management of your product backlog, in order to maximize the value of the product. The product backlog is the single source of truth which contains all the work to be done on the product. As the product owner, you have to prioritize your tech debt and make choices of what to build. In this post, we will look at a few easy tips to manage and keep you product backlog trim and healthy.

1. The product backlog does not need to be complete

A notorious pitfall that a lot of starting product owners step into is that they want to create a complete product backlog at the start of a new project, especially if they come from more traditional or project oriented environments. Like traditional waterfall models, the product owner would like to define the scope and outcome to the project upfront. However, as agile methodology grows increasingly popular, product ownership has shifted focus from delivering products instead of projects. Product development is a never ending process and the list of requirements, wishes and demands will keep growing and shrinking over time based on the product life cycle.

2. Order the backlog for clarity

The order of user stories in the product backlog must be one of the top criteria’s for a product owner. This helps explain the intended path of execution to the development team and stakeholders, which is a moving target for a product owner. It also keeps you organized, makes finding and discussing product backlog items easier, and clears up what your stories you target finish before your next release. The backlog must be ordered by value, where value is economic benefit the user story brings to the product in terms of the product vision and roadmap.

3. Focus on value

The product backlog is not a wish list for every idea stakeholders have for a product. There is absolutely no point spending time on something that doesn’t deliver value. If something doesn’t deliver value, then it should not be in on your product backlog. As the product manager, it is your responsibility to make sure you have a justification for why a user story is valuable. A consistent system to estimate the business value of user stories in the backlog can be a good way to prioritize and defend the value of your users stories.

4. Take help from your teams

Since the product owner is the responsible for product backlog management, many product owners prefer doing the backlog management completely by themselves. While, this is a not a bad thing, i have personally found it more effective to manage the backlog in conjunction with my development team. Regular meeting with dev leadership helps you gather their feedback and hypothesize new insights to build your backlog. Moreover, your product backlog will be healthy if you regularly groom and refine it in collaboration with the development team.

5. Visualize it

Visualizing your backlog and putting it up on a wall is one of the best ways to prioritize and eliminate items on your backlog. You can simply use pen and paper and pin up the output on your wall, although there are smart software solutions available for the same purpose. However, there are smart ready solutions for visualizing the product backlog available in the market. Backlog priority chart and Hygger are a couple of tools that can be used to visualize and also add a weighted methodology to your user stories.