Knowing your priorities is crucial for every team, especially in a startup environment where efficient iteration through the first versions of your product keeps progress aligned with the project roadmap. Not only does a product team need to keep track of a list of priorities, but they also need to effectively categorize priorities to assess when each item needs to be completed. A product backlog is a list of features, tasks, or bug fixes needed to launch or improve a product.

Here are 5 tips on how to prioritize your product backlog:

1. Determine the value and duration of each item

Understanding the value and impact on users, as well as how long each backlog item will take, gives product managers the information needed to understand how high of a priority the item is. The value of an item can be conveyed through tags or the task description, and the duration can be estimated based on a point system or by a time metric such as number of days.

For example, a task that improves the onboarding flow for admin users may be determined to have lower priority than a task that improves a key feature for all users because the value and impact is higher for a task that affects a more important feature for a larger number of users. Regarding the duration, sometimes a team may want to tackle more complex tasks first, while other times it’s more worth it to launch a simpler, higher-value feature before a complex, lower-value feature.

2. Determine dependencies for each item

To accurately estimate the total amount of time an item will take, we also need to consider the tasks that must be completed before the specific item can be started. This can be organized by either linking to other tasks that the current task depends on, or by organizing tasks under parent tasks and subtasks. Sometimes, it’s also helpful to further break down the dependencies list into categories such as “Blocked By” and “Is Blocking” to show which tasks the current item depends on, and which tasks depend on the current item.

Other useful properties of a backlog item include the status, assignee, and assignee status to help stakeholders assess the progress of an item and whether any changes are needed to ensure the continual success of operations.

3. Add tags to categorize items

Aside from creating tags to mark the Priority and Status of an item, tags are also useful to quickly show the type of item and other informative properties such as:

• Bug, improvement/tasks, user stories, new features or existing features

• MVP vs non-MVP

• What user role the task is for (useful for projects with multiple user roles)

• Frontend vs Backend (useful for teams where not all engineers are full-stack)

4. Organize backlog into sprint backlogs

Organizing the product backlog into separate timeboxes called sprints is extremely effective for differentiating between high priorities that are more urgent and high priorities that are more applicable in the future. This helps the team to focus on what’s currently most important.

5. Keep very low priority items off of your backlog

It can be tempting to include every required item you can think of in your backlog to keep a comprehensive record, but this can quickly make the backlog cluttered, especially for complex products. Organizing low priority items (that are still essential for a product’s success) into a separate list from the backlog keeps the team focused and gives clear indication on what items have more flexibility in terms of deadline and urgency.

Sources:

ProductPlan

Asana