In product management, backlog optimization is a key part of delivering high-quality products to users. Keeping your team’s backlog well-prioritized drives clear focus, streamlines workflow, and helps you deliver better products that delight customers.
Whether you’re a scrum master, in product management, or on the product development team, this article will show you how to effectively manage a backlog—and how qualitative and quantitative data helps you clearly understand which product features drive results, and which ones need to be deleted or archived.
Summary
Five benefits of backlog management include improved team focus, a streamlined workflow, impactful delivery, and increased customer delight
Follow these five backlog management tips to keep your backlog organized and streamlined:
Start with a product strategy: a deliberate strategy tells the team where to go to serve a particular customer, and which product backlog items are a priority to satisfy those customer’s needs
Make the backlog manageable with prioritization: to keep the backlog short, you must create a prioritized list of items for each iteration
Use the word 'no' diplomatically: the goal is to delight your customers, not to fulfill every request or say ‘yes’ to every idea
Manage product backlog as a team: responsible and inclusive product managers have consistent, frequent, and well-managed collaboration meetings with stakeholders
Keep stakeholders updated: share transparent updates–like a regular email bulletin–with stakeholders to communicate the current status of your backlog
Contentsquare helps product management teams manage backlogs by letting them empathize with users and collect valuable feedback through tools like Voice of Customer, AI-Powered Surveys, Session Replays, and Heatmaps to better understand user needs
What are the benefits of effective backlog management?
A product backlog is a centralized list of ideas and initiatives for things like new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, and infrastructure optimizations. The backlog is dynamic, updated constantly, and never completed.
Efficiently managing your product backlog provides the foundation for successful agile teams and products. Allowing too many ideas and changing priorities to drive your backlog will become unmanageable and waste your most important resources: people, time, and money.
And anything that strains those resources beyond capacity will naturally have a negative impact on your top priority: your customers.
Successful product managers have a strategy to keep teams engaged, avoid chaos, and effectively manage an endless number of ideas and initiatives in their backlog—items have clear definitions, business values, and estimations of the resources needed to complete them.
When you manage your backlog with a disciplined, process-driven, and collaborative methodology, you'll see
Improved team focus: teams don’t waste time arguing over information that’s not been validated
Streamlined workflow: teams aren’t working on tasks that are redundant or inefficient
Impactful delivery: features are delivered on time and meet business objectives
Customer delight: beyond meeting customer needs, you're building authentic relationships that stand the test of time
Now, it’s all well and good preaching the virtues of a well-managed backlog; what you want to know is how to put this into practice.
Luckily, at Contentsquare, we not only give product management teams the tools to better prioritize their backlog: we also have our own agile product management team with a wealth of experience to share in getting it done.
💡 Pro tip: it’s important that everyone on the team fully understands your product strategy. Try recording a video to explain your strategy—it’s much easier to convey the message that way, and you reduce the risk of miscommunication or misalignment.
5 backlog management tips for product managers
Here are five tips from a product management team that’s been around the block:
1. Start with a product strategy
Proper backlog management starts with a clearly written and articulated product strategy. The strategy needs to define
Product segmentation. This includes product positioning, market opportunities, and target customers.
The problem the product solves for the customers. How does each feature address a user’s pain point?
How the product stacks up against competitors—and how it will evolve. Are the key competitive features clearly differentiated?
A deliberate strategy tells the team where to go to serve a particular customer, and which product backlog items are a priority to satisfy those customer’s needs.
2. Make the backlog manageable with prioritization
An exhaustive backlog will become confusing and difficult to manage. To keep the backlog short, you must create a prioritized list of items—and user feedback can help you do that, by understanding which initiatives matter most to your customers.
Use Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer tools like Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys or feedback collection widgets to understand user behavior and collect user feedback.
With your user feedback, you can host backlog refinement sessions and take the following actions to prioritize your ideas:
Remove low-priority items based on customer experience surveys
Keep aspirational items off the backlog until they’ve been properly vetted
Further prioritize features and ideas based on a Cost of Delay (CoD) analysis
💡 Pro tip: when prioritizing your product backlog, understand which ideas or initiatives have dependencies—i.e. items that can't be completed without another item being completed first. Items with dependencies may need to be deprioritized until all other necessary features are built.
For example, if Session Replay and user feedback data indicate customers are having trouble finding a particular feature of your product, you’ll want to fix it right away—but if that feature has underlying issues preventing it from working on a fundamental level, you need to address those issues, first.
3. Use the word 'no' diplomatically
One of a product manager's challenges is that they can feel pressured to accept every request from stakeholders and team members—but the goal is to delight your customers, not to fulfill every request or say ‘yes’ to every idea. Drive results and efficiencies (not to mention profitability) by saying 'no' more frequently.
It’s important not to become an internal blocker and remain open to new requests, but saying ‘no’ helps you prioritize without distraction.
“I do believe that saying 'no' is a necessary part of the product management discipline, but the most successful product managers I’ve worked with (measured by the trust their stakeholders put in them) can more often than not reframe a cold 'no' to stakeholder requests into language that sounds more like 'Not now, here’s why…' Product managers who bring stakeholders along for the prioritization journey help them see a more complete picture of initiatives and ideas that are all competing for scarcity we all share: time.” - Meg Murphy - VP of Product at Circuit
4. Manage product backlog as a team
Responsible and inclusive product managers have consistent, frequent, and well-managed collaboration meetings with stakeholders. It’s common practice to hold stakeholder meetings on a regular basis—but be sure to respect everyone's schedules by limiting meetings to only those who are necessary, while still encouraging participation from across the team.
You can do this by collecting feedback async across the team; sending out an internal survey ahead of each meeting; scheduling regular AMAs; or by putting individual team members on a meeting rotation, giving each person an opportunity to participate.
Every product team member will have valuable feedback, so use these meetings to discuss how to prioritize the backlog to increase understanding and buy-in. This will lead to a clear understanding across the team of what has been prioritized and why.
5. Keep stakeholders updated
Share transparent updates with stakeholders to communicate the current status of your backlog.
Updates could take the form of giving stakeholders access to a live dashboard featuring an up-to-date to-do list. Or it could be a regular email bulletin to relevant people in the company, featuring just a snapshot of the dashboard.
Which update is more suitable will vary depending on how many people you need to keep in the loop and the granularity of insights required. What’s needed might also change throughout the year—for instance, you may want to issue more frequent updates during a high-profile project that’s moving very quickly, such as an impending product launch.
💡 Pro tip: keeping relevant people updated is necessary, but it’s also important not to spam people with information they don’t need.
Keep in mind that a lot of stakeholders won’t need granular detail on every item in your backlog but would be interested in a high-level status update. For example, you could highlight items where the priority level has changed since the last update, but leave out the details about your decision-making process.
Other high-level information stakeholders may be interested in could include how many issues have been resolved since the last update, how many have been added to the backlog, and metrics that indicate efficiency (i.e. how long the oldest item has been in the backlog).
How Contentsquare can help you prioritize your backlog
Product experience (PX) insights give you quantitative and qualitative data about user behavior and UX to help you validate hypotheses and prioritize ideas and initiatives in your product backlog.
Contentsquare's tools—Voice of Customer (VoC) tools, Session Replay, and Heatmaps—help you understand how users experience your product and let you collect direct, VoC feedback from end users so you know which product changes to make first.
With Contentsquare, you can confidently decide which backlog items need to be prioritized—and why.
Here are a few ways Contentsquare can help you collect insights to evaluate and prioritize your product backlog:
Relive the user experience. Contentsquare Session Replay lets you empathize with your users and experience your product from their perspective to see what works—and what doesn’t. This gives you a clearer picture of which features need the most attention.
In-the-moment feedback—in your customer’s own words. Contentsquare Voice of Customer tools give you customer feedback about why customers stay—or why they leave. Addressing issues that cause customers to bounce or exit (or even churn) from your site should receive the highest priority in your upcoming sprint.
Continuous data capture over time to make accurate comparisons of features. Contentsquare’s Heatmaps show you where users spend most of their time, so you can prioritize which areas need the most immediate attention.
Product backlog FAQs
What is a product backlog?
A product backlog is a living document that lists product ideas and initiatives, which could include new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, and infrastructure changes. A product owner typically owns the backlog.
How do I manage a product backlog?
Managing your product backlog starts with following these five tips:
Start with a product roadmap
Make the backlog manageable with prioritization
Use the word ‘no’ diplomatically
Manage product backlog as a team event
Keep stakeholders updated
Collaborate and prioritize with teams and stakeholders, and lean on experience insights tools like Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer, Heatmaps, Session Replay, and AI-Powered Surveys.
How can Contentsquare help manage a product backlog?
Experience insights from Contentsquare will help improve your backlog prioritization process and delight customers. Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay tools help product managers formulate hypotheses and analyze experiments so they can make informed decisions about where to focus resources. Customer feedback from Contentsquare’s AI-Powered Surveys and feedback collection widget helps you build a complete picture of the product experience so you can confidently decide which backlog items need to be prioritized—and why, ensuring alignment with the product goal.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.