Product backlogs: everything you need to know

In product development, the sky’s the limit. At least at first. But without a product backlog, it’s extremely difficult to ensure you’re prioritizing the right tasks. You run the risk of expending effort on low-priority features or creating sub-par code in an effort to meet deadlines quickly. Ultimately, these little mistakes can sink a product.

Read on to learn exactly what a product backlog is, what it contains, how to use it, and which tools work best. Or use the table of contents to jump to a specific topic from this list. 

What is a product backlog?

A product backlog is the inventory of work used by software development teams to queue up desired features, bug fixes, and other technical tasks. It’s essentially a development to-do list. The product backlog ties back to a company’s product roadmap, which helps prioritize items and tasks.

Different teams will have their own ways of using the backlog. For instance, a sprint backlog is a subset of product backlog items that a Scrum Team has committed to delivering in a quick sprint. (If you’re not familiar, Scrum Team is an Agile methodology term for a small breakout group working closely together to deliver product requirements.)

All product backlogs help software teams stay organized around work that needs to be done. But while a small startup might use a system as rudimentary as sticky notes or a whiteboard, larger teams typically adopt specific tools for creating, tracking, and sharing their product backlog. 

Your product backlog should be built on a tool that’s user-friendly, flexible enough to be customized, and easily accessible, particularly in the cloud. Ultimately, it’s why sticky notes and white boards won’t scale. But cloud-based relational databases like Airtable do. 

Why relational databases are ideal for product backlogs

Teams frequently use a product backlog in tandem with a requirements doc, which is the universal document listing all the requirements of the product. It essentially describes what the product should do and how it will function. The product backlog, on the other hand, is an organizational overview of which products and features are in the development queue. Development leans heavily on both of these assets when creating and refining a product.

Tools that connect the two documents make your life simpler—hence the advantage of using a relational database. This allows stakeholders to see the connections between your backlog and your requirements, without having to switch tools or coordinate with a product owner.

As you decide which tool to use for your product backlog, first consider what it will contain.

What does the product backlog contain?

While every product backlog is unique, most include some combination of the following items.

1. New features

Documenting all features (both planned and wished-for) lets teams prioritize what they work on and assign resources. The more organized and strategic they are about the product backlog, the more quickly new features get developed.

For example, planned features for a news app might offer users the ability to bookmark an article, highlight text, or share content with friends.

2. Bugs 

Detecting and fixing bugs is critical to product development. Knowing how to identify and prioritize bugs makes it easier to assign resources and fix glitches more quickly.

For example, after launch, the product team might discover that the news app is consistently failing to refresh for users on certain operating systems.

3. Technical debt work

It’s not uncommon for teams to accrue “technical debt” as they release software. In an effort to get the feature or the product out the door, developers are sometimes forced to take coding shortcuts, which inevitably must be corrected down the line by reworking or rewriting code. 

Technical debt should be prioritized highly in your product backlog. The longer teams go without fixing technical debt, the closer they get to a dreaded state: software entropy. The app will eventually “rot” and become unusable and unfixable.

Going back to our news app example—if the app isn’t built to scale the number of publications from launch, it will be more challenging to go back and build in that capability. (Sooner is better than later.) 

4. Knowledge acquisition

A product backlog typically also contains knowledge acquisition items. These are processes and tasks associated with transferring domain expert knowledge to software systems. A term frequently used in Agile development, it explains how features are conceived, analyzed, and built. Building software has a steep learning curve, so it pays to integrate a clear task list into the product backlog.

For example: If a certain feature will integrate with another product, the team first needs to investigate what programming language is needed to build the integration.

Despite these standard components, a product backlog is not a static collection of items. It’s a dynamic tool that keeps track of work priorities as they shift and as tasks are checked off. To fully understand a product backlog means understanding how it functions in motion.

How does a product backlog work?

If the concept of a product backlog now makes sense in theory, you can only truly understand it by seeing it in action. Here are some of the key concepts to operating your product backlog:

Describe your backlog items

It’s common practice among engineering teams to contextualize product backlog entries as user stories. A non-narrative listing for a desired feature might look something like this: Add the capability to edit items in shopping cart

But a user story truly brings the need to life. The same feature might be described in this way: As a shopper, I want to be able to change the quantity of items in the shopping cart, including deleting items altogether. 

If your product owners understand the logic for the product backlog entry, they can make smarter prioritization decisions. Which leads us to...

Prioritize your backlog items

Typically, items are organized in descending priority order, with the highest-priority items at the top. For this reason, in an Agile workflow, cards at the top of the list are most detailed, since they’re the highest-priority tasks. Further down the list, cards and tasks become less detailed. 

Assign owners and hold them accountable

A single product owner might own the product backlog, but for most teams, granting access to multiple stakeholders (engineers, product managers, perhaps even sales and marketing staff) is essential. Collaboration is key for “backlog grooming”—removing finished items, adding new items, periodically re-assessing priority or re-assigning ownership of specific tasks.

A note about Agile workflow

 The Agile methodology is a popular way of executing technical projects. The context is simple:

1. Build something quickly (a sprint)

2. Ship it fast

3. Change it based on feedback

The whole idea is to get apps and other products to customers quickly, and that means it’s never perfect when it ships. For this reason, teams that work in the Agile way rely on their product backlog to continue to iterate the product. 

Read more about How to build your company's custom agile workflow

How to use Airtable for your product backlog

Using a product backlog well can determine the success or failure of your whole team.  Choosing the right tool gives the right visibility to relevant stakeholders, making it easy to track changes to tasks, and connect other relevant pieces of information.

Airtable, a cloud-based relational database, gives stakeholders a familiar way to view the same information as a spreadsheet. In Airtable, you can create various views, like a kanban view, a calendar view, and even a Gantt view. You can present information from your product backlog in customized ways for specific stakeholders. For instance, a team member can create their own kanban board view of their assigned tasks from the greater product backlog, without having to pick through a long list. 

Even if you aren’t working with Agile methodology, a product backlog can still be an effective way to track and prioritize tasks. For a kickstart, use Airtable’s Agile Workflow Template.