How Should I Organize My Product Backlog? Follow These Best Practices for Tech Teams
In product development, keeping an organized backlog is crucial to ensuring your team’s productivity and focus on high-impact activities. Many companies use Jira, a popular project management tool, for managing backlogs through sprints. However, the challenge arises when determining how to order tickets in the Jira backlog. If a lower-priority ticket is more refined than higher priority tickets, where does it sit in the backlog?
The Dual Approach: An Active and Inactive Backlog
First of all, if your team is using Jira, I highly recommend maintaining both an active and an inactive backlog. The inactive backlog serves as a repository for stories that might not be on the immediate horizon but are worth preserving. These could be customer requests or ideas for future development.
The active backlog can be created as a “fake sprint” right above the backlog. It should contain the next 2-3 months of upcoming work. Each ticket should have at least one sentence as the description to keep the context top of mind. Tickets can be further refined when it is time to review them with the team.
Prioritization Made Simple: Stack Rankings
One challenge often faced is how to handle a refined ticket that may have a lower priority than others. When it comes to prioritizing tickets based on readiness or urgency, simplicity is key. Adopt a stack-ranking approach where the top ticket is the most urgent, followed by the second, and so on. This straightforward method ensures that everyone on the team understands the relative importance of each task.
A well-organized Jira backlog is essential for maintaining clarity and focus in tech projects. By implementing an active and inactive backlog strategy, planning strategically within the active backlog, and adopting a simple stack-ranking prioritization method, you can strike a balance between organization and flexibility so that your team is always aligned with the highest impact activities.
