Product people, what are your best practices for managing a backlog or roadmap?

Trello board with lists of top product themes/domains (working on a personal finance product, so themes are "insights", "entry", "growth"...). Each list is organized by important and nice-to-have's items, separated by a fake "------" priority line. Every new release I pick up the important items from the themes I want to focus on ✌️🥸

Avoid having a long backlog of things. Keep it simple and review it, if it won't be done in the next 2 quarters, get rid of it. Be aggressive and review tasks weekly/every sprint. Review tasks every quarter on bigger things.

A roadmap in product management serves as a visual bridge connecting the company’s vision with the tasks required to lead that brand to the market. With its help, your development team will be able to better understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture, helps to make more intelligent prioritization decisions, and assists in persuading stakeholders. A well-prepared roadmap will demonstrate all your initiatives related to launching a new software solution. If you are looking for a intuitive roadmap template, consider GanttPRO template https://ganttpro.com/roadmap-tem.... It will help you to organize different components that go into your software solution launch.

Online whiteboarding really helps. I perform my tasks really great on digital boards. I can recommend my friends that launched today http://meow.ph/weje :D

Hi all, there are three sides of this. Feedback, internal requests, product roadmap. We focus on prioritizing what users really want in one place as a Producter. Also, We provide a shared place for tech and non-tech teams to make product management more visible. Producter both helps product and customer-facing teams to make informed decisions backed by customer feedback. For next-generation product companies: https://producter.co/

Backlogs should be sparse. Try to clear them out at regular intervals — at least once a year, ideally sooner. If a feature suggestion has been sitting in there for a long time and gets deleted, it will get re-added if it's important enough. Otherwise, you know that it was probably written in response to a particular situation. As a PM, you should be focusing your team on the long term, high value work. Roadmaps have to exist for a variety of different stakeholders (and sometimes the same stakeholder needs to dive in), so you need to be able to roll up and unfurl your plan given the situation. So my advice here is to make sure that you've organized your tasks as much as possible upfront. Otherwise, you're in for a world of pain later when someone has a question about status.

Excellent question. Looking for expert tips.

Map your ideas with customer feedback/requests, this helped us to weigh the impact and urgency as well as evaluate how we're solving customer needs and if that fits the strategic direction. But first you do need some customer insights, which you can check out this tool for collecting different types of feedback http://usersnap.com/

Build two backlogs; one for your long-term roadmap and one for your current sprint. The long-term roadmap should include high level problems to be solved or planned product evolutions while the sprint backlog should include single-function features. We build our long-term roadmap backlog every year based on our annual goals and we build our sprint backlog every six weeks based on our quarterly objectives and key results.

Our company has software called "Bizixx" (https://bizixx.fatbit.com/?=pc) This helps in maintaining a track of all the tasks. You can set a task as a priority and manage your dashboard. You can mark a task as complete or put it on hold. It's an amazing Software by FATbit Technologies for employees as you can mark your leave and do much more to manage your work.

The Basecamp strategy of not have a backlog (https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1...) is intriguing to me. I agree with the book that backlogs get stale and your team ends of spending a tremendous amount of time keeping things organized that may be out of date. Do others follow this methodology?

Oh, this question is really interesting for me too. Personnaly I wait for answers

Hi, For me this are the top 4 👇🏽 👉🏼Always prioritize. 👉🏼 Review your backlog periodically. 👉🏼Keep items you are not ready for off the backlog. 👉🏼 Add only tasks you plan to do.

The best practice is to have a system that allows work to flow in the right direction towards an impactful outcome. Let me share with you an outline of what this system looks like. It is broken down into three parts. It’s based on an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system that is widely used amongst tech companies in Silicon Valley like Google. Top-level Goals Key Results Tasks List Then go by the following cadence. Top-level Goals are created yearly. Key Results are reviewed quarterly. Tasks List is updated monthly. Tasks List, therefore, serves as your To-Do list while making sure that you are only putting an effort into activities that are aligned with my top-level goals. You may check out the system I’ve personally used here on Product Hunt - I name it the Creator System but it's good for businesses too https://www.producthunt.com/post... I’ve populated the system with relatable goals, key results and tasks, as well as great resources for creators. You can see the outcome of the system by checking out my social media and website.

Using story mapping is really useful to get everyone on the same page and understanding the big picture of what's being built.

Focus on goals, not features, Think product strategy first, Create a narrative your team buys into, Leave the details for the product backlog, Stay flexible and many more.

Write everything that comes to mind, let it sit for a couple of days, get rid of what doesn't make sense anymore, talk about the remaining ideas with someone else and narrow it down

Using agile methodology within Notion databases. Works like a dream!

I think FigJam is a great tool for this