About this template
Picture this: You’re in a Slack thread with a developer and support engineer tackling an issue with your newest feature. You expected a normal conversation — instead, you got a goldmine of customer insights and product ideas.
But you need to flesh out and prioritize these ideas before you can do anything. If you go into another tool to create an official ticket, you’ll lose the context of the organic conversation, not to mention that further conversations will be scattered between different apps and become siloed.
Luckily, you don’t have to switch between several tools to turn ideas into actions. You can manage your product backlog from within Slack with a backlog planning template that allows you to organize and visualize your backlog while collaborating organically.
What is a product backlog?
A product backlog is a fundamental part of many project management methodologies, particularly Agile and Scrum. The official Scrum guide defines a product backlog as “the single source of work undertaken by the Scrum team.”
New features, improvements for existing products, and larger bug fixes must all be in the product backlog before they can be added to the product roadmap. In addition to being the source of truth for sprint planning, the product backlog is essential for strategic planning and effective collaboration with stakeholders across teams.
What is a backlog template?
A backlog template helps you standardize and organize your product backlog. Product teams can use a team backlog template to perform critical tasks such as prioritization, sprint planning, and backlog refinement.
Using a backlog template makes it much easier to keep everyone on track and ensure that you always have the right information in the right format. The ideal backlog template will look different for every company, so make sure to get input from all stakeholders when creating yours.
The benefits of our project backlog template
You can now build and manage your backlog within Slack using a dynamic template that supports your project management in a way that’s collaboration-focused and organic to the way your team is already working.
Centralize your creative workflows
This project backlog template is essential for teams that want to ensure that no creative spark, user story, or backlog item gets lost in daily communications. By automatically collecting and storing backlog items, whether for sprint planning or internal initiatives, the product backlog template provides a seamless way to organize requirements while aligning with best practices for project teams.
Easy idea storage
The backlog prioritization template is where team members can quickly add new backlog items mentioned in conversations, including user stories and feature ideas. This fluid process allows managers and stakeholders to visualize the flow of ideas, fostering collaboration within the team. The tracker ensures that no item is overlooked while offering a clear view of what needs to be addressed next. By providing a centralized place for all product backlogs, it’s easier to keep track of story points and estimates, helping your team build momentum and stay on the same page.
Strategic organization
Once backlog items are captured, the shared backlog template allows team members to organize them by priority and impact on project development. This sorting process enables sprint planning to focus on high-value items while addressing stakeholders’ requirements. Whether it’s a sprint backlog template for your development team or a task tracking backlog, this tool ensures your plans are aligned with business goals. By using this approach, teams can identify what’s done and what needs immediate attention, streamlining agile workflows for optimal efficiency.
Efficient progress tracking
Tracking the progress of backlog lists from inception to realization is crucial, and this work backlog template can help make it easier. With this tool, team members can view backlogs and monitor the status of initiatives, story points, or features in real time. This continuous visibility across the entire team ensures sprints remain on track, enabling managers to make adjustments based on evolving priorities. Whether you’re using this template for sprint backlog management or broader agile project management needs, Slack’s backlog template can be customized to ensure that everything is adapted to efficiently and effectively address your work operations.
What should be included in a backlog tracker template?
Our task backlog template is designed to give you the flexibility to create a product backlog that aligns with your team’s workflows and tools. However, there are a few elements that are critical to every product backlog.
User stories
User stories are the backbone of a product backlog. They focus the item’s purpose by defining what the end user needs and how they’ll directly benefit. User stories should only be a few simple sentences, so add a text field to your backlog template and write user stories that include:
- Who the user is. That might be their role in a B2B context, or their demographic in a B2C context.
- What they want. Use “I” statements to really get in the end user’s headspace.
- Why they need it. How does their specific “what” fit into their larger “why”?
For example, “As a project manager, I want to turn Slack conversations into backlog items so that I can organically and effectively leverage my team’s insights and ideas.” However you format your backlog template, your user stories column should be front and center.
Priority
This field is essential for the product owner, who has to regularly prioritize and refine the backlog. Collaborate with your product owner to see what’s most helpful to them, but typically the backlog info that supports prioritization includes:
- Business value: What direct value is this feature or improvement providing?
- Category: Is this a new feature, a product improvement, or a bug?
- Urgency: Are there any pressing external or internal deadlines that need to be considered?
- Dependencies: Are there any other features or improvements that depend on this backlog item?
- Customer requests: How many customer requests have been received for this feature, improvement, or bug? How much pressure is coming from high-value customers?
Providing this kind of rich data in your product backlog template makes it much easier to prioritize the backlog and plan sprints.
Story points (Agile and Scrum)
Story points are an essential part of the Agile and Scrum methodologies. They measure the estimated time and effort to complete a user story, and are a major factor in prioritization. There are many different approaches to determining story points, but the main elements are:
- Complexity of technical aspects, data, and testing requirements
- Effort needed
- Risk or uncertainty
- Amount of work involved
- Required resources
When designing your team task backlog template, collaborate with product owners to choose how many of these elements to include in the template along with a field for the final estimate of story points.
Status
Status is the simplest element of your product backlog template, but essential to keeping projects on track. Some potential statuses to include in a dropdown field:
- To do
- On hold
- Ready for development
- In progress
- On track
- At risk (of being late/delayed)
- In review
- Testing
- Ready for deployment
- Done
Talk with your team and other stakeholders to determine what’s most useful.
Stakeholders
Last but not least, stakeholder collaboration should be built into your project backlog template — and it’s often the most frustrating part of the process. In Slack, we’re all about collaboration, so our task tracking backlog template includes some special fields and features to help you work with stakeholders.
- Tag one or more people in a backlog item, then create a workflow to notify them with relevant updates.
- Define a default user(s) (such as the product owner) whenever a new item is created.
- Automatically share updates to channels using the channel field type and custom automated workflows, so your project team never misses an important backlog update.
- Link to Slack messages either by creating a backlog item from a message or by adding message links later. This way you never lose track of those critical conversations.
Stakeholder collaboration is critical to project success and this backlog template offers a lot of creative ways to manage it.
Third-party integrations to complement your project backlog template
Product backlogs require a lot of effort to create, maintain, and update. With third-party Slack integrations and Workflow Builder, you can leverage your backlog template to make your entire project management process more efficient and collaborative.
The best way to leverage integrations for your product backlog is to use your frontline tools to automatically create new backlog items.
(Just make sure you use a unique status for all backlog items that are created automatically so that you can easily review them and weed out any irrelevant or duplicate alerts.)
Add feature requests to your product backlog
Customer requests — and requests from potential customers — are key to developing a truly great product and closing sales. They also provide a great source of ideas for your product roadmap.
Use Slack integrations to automatically add feature requests as new backlog items. This streamlines the pipeline for feature requests and helps you develop a better product more efficiently.
Example integrations:
Add improvements for your product backlog
Product improvements are easy to overlook because they’re not urgent bugs or shiny new features. They’re also often buried in customer support tickets and not visible to the product team until they become a big problem.
Integrate your ticketing software with Slack so that your support agents have a direct line to your product managers. This collaboration allows you to proactively solve user problems and avoid friction between teams.
Example integrations:
Capture and create backlog items for bugs
Bugs are the most frustrating element of your product backlog, but they can’t be ignored either. As with product improvements, the proactive approach means less frustrations for both your customers and your development teams.
Use integrations to automatically add bugs to your backlog so that you can prioritize accordingly.
Example integrations:
