Table of Contents
Table of Contents
From Roadmap to Product Backlog
Items on the roadmap are like groceries on your shopping list. They become effective only when really being worked on by teams which happens by turning them into items on the product backlog. As the nature of the backlog heavily depends on the delivery framework in use, we will only briefly touch on product backlogs here.
Near-Term Work Items for the Team
A product backlog is a list of the new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver in order to achieve a specific outcome.
It’s important to understand that the product roadmap and the product backlog are two different yet strongly related artifacts:
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While the product roadmap lists several product outcomes, the product backlog translates these into features that aim at delivering these outcomes.
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While the product roadmap, as with quarterly rolling roadmaps, lays out a mid- and long-term strategy, the product backlog is more short-term and contains work items for the weeks and months ahead.
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While parts of the product roadmap may reside in the problem space, items in the product backlog clearly describe potential approaches in the solution space.
Depending on the framework used in product delivery, an item in the product backlog might have different requirements, such as whether it can be completed in a single iteration. Backlog items also come in various formats, with user stories and user story maps being the most popular.
As a result, the product backlog is, e.g., a prioritized list of backlog items that goes into Scrum sprint planning or the backlog as the left-most column of a Kanban board. See Agile Frameworks for more details.
Nothing gets done by the team that isn’t on the product backlog. Conversely, just because an item is on the backlog does not guarantee it will be done — the selection of the items to be worked on is up for joint refinement and planning as part of the delivery process.
Further Reading
Agile Alliance
A product backlog is a list of the new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver in order to achieve a specific outcome.