Product backlogs are fascinating – and one of the topics I get asked about most. If you’re a product professional who works with lists, you’ll understand why. After all, long and weighty to-do lists can be intimidating. I know when I first started in product management, they sometimes seemed overwhelming. You need to strike a fine balance between managing one, while still refining, classifying, and prioritising it, knowing all the while it will continue to grow in length.

That’s all well and good of course, if it’s a list you have created yourself. But more often than not, you join an existing team and inherit a backlog, which is often unwieldy and a little chaotic. To cope with just this eventuality, I have created a document to help you introduce some method to your list madness.

It covers the following topics:

1. What is a product backlog and why is it important?
2. How to collate customer feedback
3. How to collate the internal team’s feedback
4. How to define your product backlog
5. How to classify your product backlog
6. Practical working examples