What is a product backlog? (And how to create one)

When your product backlog is healthy, teams move faster, focus on the right priorities, and deliver with confidence. But our Report for Product Teams reveals a critical challenge: only one in three product teams say their workflows are truly efficient and repeatable.

The reality is that traditional product development workflows aren’t enough anymore. In the age of AI, meeting customer expectations and leadership demands requires a new way of working. A 2025 study on GenAI-enabled backlog grooming found that automating refinement improved precision to 100% and cut completion time by 45%—a clear reminder that backlog health isn’t just helpful, it’s essential.

In this guide, you’ll learn what a modern product backlog looks like in the AI era, how to create and manage one effectively, and which prioritization techniques will help your backlog become a driver of innovation at your organization, not a blocker.

What is a product backlog?

A product backlog is a dynamic, prioritized list of everything a team might build—new features, bug fixes, technical debt, and user stories—that guides product development across the product lifecycle. It serves as a single source of truth, evolving continuously as customer needs, stakeholder input, and business priorities shift.

While any development team can use a backlog, it’s most commonly associated with agile and scrum practices. Regardless of methodology, a backlog helps teams stay focused and aligned on the work ahead. For example, a small startup might manage their backlog with sticky notes or a simple kanban board, while larger organizations often rely on specialized tools to track, prioritize, and share backlog items at scale.

Who owns and uses product backlogs?

The scrum product owner is usually accountable for the product backlog, but for most teams, multiple stakeholders (engineers, product managers, designers, and even sales and marketing staff) contribute. Collaboration is key for removing finished items, adding new ones, reassessing priorities, and moving around task ownership.

The backlog is used across the broader organization by:

Once you know who’s involved, the next step is understanding what actually goes into a backlog.

What is included in a product backlog?

A strong backlog balances big-picture initiatives with the details needed for iteration and sprint planning. Common product backlog items include:

User stories

User stories are small, end-user–focused requirements that describe a single piece of functionality. Each user story should be clear, concise, and written in plain language so that anyone can understand it. To keep work manageable, user stories are designed to be small enough to complete within a single sprint. For example, a user story might state: “As a user, I want to sort my transactions by date so I can review recent payments quickly.”

Epics

Epics are large initiatives that are too extensive to complete within a single sprint. They provide structure for complex features or cross-functional work, helping teams break down big goals into smaller, more manageable pieces. For example, a mobile app product launch might be organized as an epic that includes components such as login functionality, core features like transaction history, bill pay, and notifications, as well as a settings module. Each of these components can then be broken down further into individual user stories.

Bug fixes

Bug fixes address issues that negatively affect a product’s workflow or performance. These problems are often identified by the quality assurance (QA) team during testing or reported directly by users. For example, a bug fix in the backlog might involve repairing a broken “forgot password” link on mobile, which helps prevent user frustration and reduces the number of support tickets.

Technical debt

Technical debt refers to deferred maintenance or rework that results from earlier shortcuts taken during development. Teams often make these tradeoffs intentionally to release features more quickly, knowing the cost will be additional work later on. Over time, however, this “debt” can accumulate and slow down productivity. Research from McKinsey suggests that product teams should reserve 10–20% of their time to reduce technical debt. The payoff is substantial: engineers can reclaim up to 50% more of their time for value-generating work, while organizations benefit from lower costs, simpler systems, improved uptime, and greater resiliency.

New features

There will always be new features and function requests coming from many directions. A long-term customer with a significant investment may request that you add multi-language support to enable global user adoption. This may even be part of their original contract. Sales reps may identify gaps while interacting with buyers, and product management will keep an eye on competitors to ensure parity or differentiation. Market shifts, such as new regulations, can initiate a new need. And expanding into a new industry vertical might require features for that new audience.

Dependencies

Linked tasks across teams that affect the delivery order. Feature B (custom reports in UI) can't launch until Feature A's new reporting data pipeline is in place.

Benefits of a product backlog

The product backlog is your to-do list. It helps the entire team know what to work on and why, maintains focus, and keeps product operations and the development process running smoothly. Some of the biggest benefits include:

You will experience these benefits with a structured approach to building and maintaining your backlog. For example, many teams use a product roadmap template to keep the backlog tied to long-term strategy and timing.

How to create a product backlog in 5 steps 

Creating a product backlog gives your team a clear, manageable system for organizing work. Start with a big idea, gather input, break it into smaller pieces, prioritize what matters most, and keep refining so your backlog stays effective—even as it grows.

1. Define your product goal

Every backlog starts with a clear vision. Defining the product goal ensures your team understands what you are building and why it matters—to your business, your users, and your customers. This north star gives context for every item in the backlog, so you avoid a scattered list of tasks and instead build toward meaningful outcomes. Ask questions like: What problem are we solving? Who benefits from this? How will we measure success?

Product management software like Airtable ProductCentral makes this alignment easier by connecting your backlog to company-level objectives, tracking progress against OKRs, and helping you stay focused so strategy doesn’t drift.

2. Collect input from stakeholders and customers

A strong backlog reflects a wide range of perspectives, not just the product team’s. Gather insights from engineers, designers, customer success, sales, and marketing to capture internal needs and uncover opportunities across the business. This cross-functional input helps ensure your backlog stays aligned with both immediate priorities and long-term strategy.

Equally important is bringing in the voice of your customer. Pair internal feedback with insights from users to ground your backlog in real-world needs and pain points. With a solution like ProductCentral, AI can centralize feedback from across channels, highlight patterns, and surface actionable insights, so every product decision is backed by customer evidence.

3. Break down work into backlog items

Large initiatives often feel overwhelming until they are broken into actionable pieces. Translate high-level goals into structured backlog items such as epics, user stories, bugs, or technical tasks. Adding the right level of detail (think: enough for clarity, but not so much that it creates rigidity) ensures teams can estimate, plan, and execute effectively. This step often benefits from a product requirements document (PRD) to keep context and rationale documented.

4. Prioritize items

Not everything can or should be built at once. Prioritization helps the team focus on the items that deliver the most value with the least cost or complexity. Consider factors such as business impact, customer value, technical dependencies, and effort required. Frameworks like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or MoSCoW (Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won’t-have) bring structure to these decisions, helping you balance short-term wins with long-term strategy.

The right software can make prioritization far more effective. With ProductCentral, you can connect backlog items to company goals, manage your product portfolio, and allocate resources intelligently. This transforms portfolio planning from a political exercise into a true strategic advantage—one that ensures your product vision drives meaningful results.

5. Refine continuously

A backlog is never “done.” It's a living system that requires constant care. Over time, new ideas will flood in, priorities will shift, and some items will become irrelevant. Regular refinement sessions (often called backlog grooming) help you keep it clear, actionable, and aligned with current goals. This means closing outdated tasks, reordering items when priorities change, and clarifying acceptance criteria so the backlog remains a powerful tool for focus rather than a dumping ground for random ideas.

What is product backlog vs. sprint backlog?

A product backlog is the complete, evolving, and prioritized list of work items for the entire product. In contrast, a sprint backlog is a focused subset of that list, created during sprint planning, and contains only the high-priority items the team commits to delivering in the current iteration.

In other words, the product backlog is your long-term roadmap, while the sprint backlog is the short-term to-do list for a single sprint. Understanding this distinction is key, but the real challenge lies in managing the product backlog so it stays clear, relevant, and valuable to every stakeholder.

How do you manage the backlog?

Product backlog management requires balancing activity details, prioritizing tasks, and making sure stakeholders stay aligned.

Best practices include:

Methods for prioritizing the product backlog

Prioritizing a backlog can feel overwhelming, especially as it grows. The key is to keep things simple: start with one primary agile prioritization method (such as RICE, MoSCoW, or Value vs. Effort) and layer in one or two additional approaches only when they add clarity. This approach prevents overload while keeping your process flexible and scalable as the backlog evolves.

The most common methods include:

Which backlog prioritization method should you start with?

Manage your product backlog with Airtable 

A product backlog is the foundation of an agile product development process, not a dumping ground for a bunch of scattered requests. The challenge is that most get noisy, overloaded, and disconnected from business strategy and customer needs. That's where the right tools come in.

ProductCentral is the AI system of work built for product leaders. It connects customer insights, product strategy, and execution so your backlog stops being a list of tasks and starts driving real outcomes. With ProductCentral, teams can capture and organize every piece of feedback in one place, use AI to spot patterns in minutes, and link insights directly to roadmap priorities. The result is a backlog that reflects business value, remains aligned across teams, and translates customer needs into features that ship faster and have a greater impact.

See what ProductCentral can do for your team by booking a demo.