9 Steps to Product Backlog Mastery
As your software products grow more complex, involving distributed scrum teams across multiple regions, you face the challenge of aligning everyone.
Product managers often need help connecting internal business stakeholders' priorities with external development groups spread globally. Mismatched perspectives lead to frustrating, wasted efforts, delays, and products that completely miss the target user's needs.
You feel like your engineering teams operate in regional silos, building features without visibility into the broader roadmap or context. Lack of transparency causes duplication as assets get tossed over the wall between groups. Uncertainty reigns about what will be included in the next release.
Requirements constantly change, yet documentation spreads across messy email chains and outdated wikis. You worry that at any moment, some switch in strategic direction from the C-suite will derail months of work across sites. Engineers will be stuck reacting to surprises rather than anticipating what’s ahead.
However, mastering effective backlog creation and management can solve these problems at their root. It is the cornerstone for driving transparency, focus, and velocity across your complex initiatives.
This comprehensive 9-step guide reveals how you, as a product manager, can seamlessly elevate your backlog practices to connect distributed scrum teams. With thoughtful collaboration built on empathy and trust, a well-defined backlog fuels developers' clarity on which features offer the most business value and rich user experiences.
Understanding the Product Backlog
The product backlog is the development team's central source of truth. It captures all the functional and technical work required to build, enhance, and maintain the product.
Maintained and curated by the product manager, the backlog contains:
- User Stories: Short, simple descriptions of a desired capability from an end user's perspective and why they need it. Typically structured as:
"As a [user type], I want [function] so that [value]”
- Features and Functions: Larger capability groupings may comprise multiple user stories to deliver user value.
- Bugs: Defects and irregular behaviors that impair the intended functions of the product.
- Technical Debt: Work needed to upgrade outdated portions of code, refactor significant architecture changes, increase performance, improve security vulnerabilities, etc.
- Research Tasks: Discovery work needed to size future investments, build proofs of concept, conduct experiments or reduce risks/unknowns in the plan.
The product backlog serves several important, interrelated purposes:
- Strategic Planning: Translates high-level product strategy and vision into an actionable delivery roadmap. Provides visibility into planned initiatives and sequencing.
- Release Planning: Teams utilize higher-level epics and initiatives in the backlog to determine release cycles, phases, and themes. This direction sets the stage for release planning.
- Sprint Planning: Based on priority, new user stories and bugs are pulled from the backlog into the specific 2-4-week sprints. This focuses teams on the most important work first.
- Progress Tracking: Tools like Jira allow the team to view what portion of items are completed across sprints, enabling forecasting of what can be delivered and when.
With frequent input across the organization, the backlog gives complete visibility into status, scope, and priority to guide optimal development cadence.
Step 1: Establish Clear Goals and Objectives
As a product manager, before crafting a single backlog item, first align your internal product team on core goals and guiding objectives for the broader product vision.
This begins with thoroughly understanding the current market landscape and customer needs through primary research. Define your target users and the biggest underserved pain points your product will alleviate.
Next, get clear on the unique value proposition that will set your solution apart from competitors in users' minds. What innovation or differentiated approach will enable users to achieve desired outcomes they couldn't before?
Finally, build alignment amongst stakeholders on the complete product vision and what winning ultimately looks like in quantitative and qualitative terms over the next 3-5 years. Set goals for usage, revenue, capabilities, and partnerships that align with your big audacious ambition.
With your internal leadership coalition solidly on the same page about strategic objectives, communicate these targets to external engineering partners. Providing this future-state context before backlog creation allows global teams to ensure all efforts trace back to critical outcomes.
This upfront visioning, goal-setting, and alignment gives you ammunition to defend backlog prioritization decisions later. You'll tie proposed backlog items directly to advancing some piece of the established multilayered product roadmap.
Step 2: Conduct a Joint Discovery Workshop
After establishing alignment on vision and objectives with your internal team, schedule an immersive discovery workshop with strategic product leads and hands-on engineers from external vendor partners.
Set the stage for open dialogue by having all participants:
Introduce themselves
Share their experience
Highlight a key learning they bring
Use story mapping techniques focused on end-to-end user journeys. You can explore different user personas through:
Goals: What is their desired result and definition of "success"?
Actions taken: What steps do they currently have to take to reach that goal, and any breakdowns experienced?
Questions asked: What common points of confusion exist? What information are they seeking when blocked? What terminologies do they use?
Scenarios: Construct typical scenario narratives around accomplishing high-value tasks. Detail the emotional journey utilizing visual storyboarding techniques.
For example, map out personas like an emerging startup founder versus an F500 company product leader journey to evaluate and onboard engineering partners.
Conduct structured visioning exercises imagining the optimum customer experience through:
Journey phases: Discover -> Evaluate -> Purchase -> Onboard -> Manage Growth
Interactions: Email nurture campaigns, frictionless trial signups, guided capability analysis, proactive support, etc.
Touchpoints: Website, proposals, documentation portals, account management team connections
Identify major gaps revealed between the seamless, on-demand experience envisioned versus current complexities standing in the way during the customer journey. Lead the full group through constructive debate regarding possible approaches to close the prioritized gaps, allowing all voices to be heard and weighing the pros and cons of each.
Then, solidify key discussion takeaways and have both the distributed internal and external team members align on definitions of success metrics across the company, user, and technical dimensions that indicate if desired outcomes are achieved.
Conclude the productive workshop by summarizing the discoveries into draft epic themes, capabilities, constraints, risks, and clear action items for later synthesizing outputs into well-documented backlog items while perspectives remain fresh. Assign ownership for sanitization and follow-ups to keep momentum moving forward.
Step 3: Define User Stories and Requirements
Equipped with strategic alignment from your discovery workshop on user needs, experiences, and success metrics, lead your cross-functional team in collaborative backlog refinement sessions to outline executable requirements.
Leverage the following best practices for crafting user stories:
- Focus on Jobs-to-be-Done: Map stories directly to the process a user needs to progress through to achieve a goal, centered on the problem to be solved versus prescribing a solution.
- Slice vertically: Break large capabilities down into thin end-to-end slices still delivering standalone value usable in production to enable continuous delivery.
- Size appropriately: Target stories small enough to be completed in one sprint while remaining functionally independent. Encapsulate complexity behind well-defined APIs and interfaces.
- Incorporate non-functional requirements: To ensure architectural integrity, capture critical system attributes like security, compliance, quality, and performance requirements associated with a capability.
- Facilitate effective estimations: Decompose volatile high-uncertainty work items tagged for further research into investigable sub-tasks better sized for execution.
Continuously enrich details through relentless, transparent questioning from product and technical team members. Ensure a shared understanding of what “done” means for each item.
Follow up inclusive working sessions with broad documentation of agreements in tools accessible across regions to mitigate bottlenecks. Solidify definitions of success per story type to confirm achievement.
Foster global team autonomy within problem-space boundaries through structured story writing, approval, and refinement processes that enhance context while allowing creativity.
Step 4: Prioritize and Refine
With a comprehensive laundry list of backlog item ideas now gathered from multiple inputs, the next critical step is to thoughtfully prioritize each item in the desired sequence for the team to tackle based holistically on the following:
- Product Strategic Goals: Analyze how strongly an item maps to advancing high-level outcomes outlined in the product vision, including target users onboarded, revenue targets, platform capabilities delivered at each phase, total addressable market penetration, etc. An item that tangibly moves the needle on multiple fronts bubbles up compared to “nice-to-haves.”
- Customer Value: Using data from research and customer interviews, quantify and qualify the value that could be enabled for target users if that need was addressed. Balancing the breadth of appeal with delighting niche power users is an art and science.
- Implementation Effort Estimates: Using high-level sizing, factor in the total level of effort across functions. Consider associated uncertainties and degree of dependencies on other items or platforms externally managed, adding variability.
Leverage quantitative prioritization frameworks like weighted scoring, business value vs. effort 2x2 matrices, and qualitative methods like MoSCoW tagging of “must-haves” down to “won’t do now” items.
Facilitate regular backlog refinement working sessions. This will allow both internal product and external engineering members to transparently discuss the latest perspectives on priority influences and collectively re-stack rank items.
Promote continuous shared visibility for globally distributed teams into backlogs using centralized tools configurable to reflect ongoing sequencing adjustments.
Step 5: Estimate Work
With user stories and requirements gathered in the backlog, facilitate collaborative sessions for the cross-functional team to estimate the relative effort required to deliver each item.
Engage internal product managers and external development resources to apply agile estimating techniques like planning poker to build group ownership of the quantification process.
Promote practices like decomposing large uncertainties into investigable sub-tasks, comparative sizing against done stories, and tracking actuals across sprints to calibrate estimates.
Set expectations that the objective is to gain team alignment on the degree of variability and research needs – not define immutable effort targets locked months before execution.
Build a positive team culture that estimates are a discovery activity determining technical approach – not political commitments codified on paper.
Step 6: Set Up Collaboration Tools and Processes
To promote coordination across distributed teams, enabling transparency, shared understanding, and collective ownership of priorities:
- Evaluate leading project management platforms like Jira, Trello, and Asana, determining information radiators and workflows optimal for your teams’ collaborative rhythms.
- Structure tools to provide insulated but interlinked visibility into strategic and executable near-term backlogs reflecting the latest sequencing judgments.
- Define regular touchpoint discussions, allowing flexibility for both product and delivery leads to inspect pace, trade-offs, blockers, and value delivery - shaping next steps in unison.
- Reinforce context around targeted outcomes at each backlog layer and phase to re-energize staff and avoid potential perceived churn from re-planning.
Step 7: Groom Your Backlog Continuously
Effective backlog management requires acknowledging key realities of dynamic product development by both product and engineering partners:
- Priorities rapidly shift as new market data emerges
- Initial estimates have a high degree of variability
- Teams learn critical details mid-flight
Conduct regular backlog working sessions with distributed members to groom list, including:
- Reprioritizing existing stories
- Breaking down sizable items into deliverable slices
- Adding valuable new stories and pruning obsolete items no longer relevant given the latest learnings
- Updating estimates as clarity increases
Promote continuous shared refinement but avoid "analysis paralysis" over investing heavily upfront before executing to gain empirical feedback.
For example:
A team could spend weeks detailing and estimating a complex reporting feature only to learn post-release that users have different data needs than assumed.
Meanwhile, a minimum viable version could have been built and tested with actual users in a few days to validate the problem and required information firsthand.
The key is finding the right balance between enough upfront details for execution versus avoiding heavy specifications that become obsolete once actual usage occurs. Think critically about what can be gained from a basic prototype before extensive requirements work. Strive to delay decisions in complex domains until the last responsible moment when you have the most context to act wisely.
Step 8: Respect and Leverage Diversity
High-performing product teams recognize that globally distributed engineering groups hold invaluable contextual perspectives that fuel innovation.
To leverage this diversity advantage:
- Conduct open dialogue across regions to gain insights on respective users and markets. Seek to understand needs before defining requirements deeply.
- When crafting new stories, explore where injecting diverse viewpoints could spark fresh ideas unforeseen by homogenous teams.
- In sprints, enable culture empowering creativity within clear outcome goals. Allow regional teams flexibility in determining optimal technical solutions.
- Overall, tap into multifaceted perspectives intrinsic to global groups rather than constraining teams to uniform centralized edicts devoid of local relevance.
These actions will help you leverage contextual diversity for breakthroughs while maintaining alignment on strategic priorities.
Step 9: Build Trust and Transparency
When internally managed product teams collaborate with offshore engineering partners, establishing mutual trust and transparency represents a pivotal driver of success over multi-year horizons.
- Give visibility into changing product priorities, timeline constraints, skills gaps, and technical roadblocks impacting globally dispersed staff to set expectations.
- Celebrate team wins when outcomes surpass plans while frankly yet positively discussing shortcomings requiring adjustments so objectives are eventually met.
- Fuel sustained engagement by continuously investing in growth through technical upskilling initiatives and cultural exchange programs spanning regions.
- Proactively recognize external partners' invaluable expertise rather than treating them as commoditized labor. Embrace their contextual perspectives as you guide vision.
This long-view cultivation around teams' professional development and shared mission transcends fleeting contractual quid pro quo exchanges – forming bonds, ownership, and commitment to delivering lasting results.
When internal and external collaborators feel respected, trusted, and intrinsically motivated by leadership and peers alike – barriers dissolve, opening new channels for transparency and innovation.
Commit to the Journey
You now have a comprehensive 9-step framework to transform scattered groups into a cohesive, aligned product development engine.
As you felt overwhelmed by the inefficiencies of siloed priorities and poor visibility, mastering these backlog best practices will fuel the clarity, innovation, and velocity growth demands. By making backlogs the cornerstone for planning and transparency powered by empathy and trust, you set the stage for continuous improvement.
IntentSG can provide an "outside-in" perspective to bridge the gap between globally dispersed engineering teams and internal product leaders. It’s time to commit to the journey of backlog mastery and start uplifting the combined strength of your talented staff across regions.