Simple Product Backlog Example

October 9, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Links to the various product and sprint backlog templates used in Scrum are among the most popular pages on this site. While these templates are indeed useful, I believe, that during transition to Scrum too powerful tools can draw too much attention and force the team and Product Owner to learn tools instead of learning Scrum. The main point of the product backlog is to list the requirements in the strict and unambiguous order.

I created the very minimal product backlog template (XLS) for Scrum inspired by the Mike Cohn's product backlog screenshot. You can use this Excel example as a template for your own backlogs. There are plenty of comments on the sheet to help you get started. Consider it published to public domain. It would be very kind of you not to delete the link to this site, but technically you are free to copy, reuse or even resell this example.

See Also

Good or Bad

What do you think? How good is this template for starters? Would you like to see more similar templates with the different amount of functionality?

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Attachment	Size
SimpleProductBacklog.xls	28 KB

About the Author: As the Editor-in-Chief for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Artem is charged with overseeing the direction for content, advertising, and the overall management of the site. Nowadays in his day life, Artem is a product manager in a global telecommunication company where he leads the development of a product developed in extremely distributed environment. Artem has been applying Agile and researching Agile since 2005. Contact Artem

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Comments

Comments on Template

December 1, 2007 by Nick (not verified), 2 years 39 weeks ago
Comment id: 1393

Artem,

Thanks for providing this simple template. I'm utilizing a modified version of the Scrum methodology for my senior project in college, and it looks like this will come in handy. I believe the template is simple enough that a small project can utilize it without hassle.

Your experience

December 1, 2007 by Artem, 2 years 39 weeks ago
Comment id: 1394

I will be happy if this template happens to be useful for you, Nick.

It would be great if at some point you could share your impressions on how useful the template is. Also I believe a lot of people would find it useful to examine how your real world backlog evolved over time.

Acknowledgement

June 25, 2008 by Evgeniy (not verified), 2 years 9 weeks ago
Comment id: 1616

I am also in the process of doing thesis project and going to use some kind of simple Scrum for it and I hope your template will help in it.

Complex example?

July 1, 2008 by Anonymous (not verified), 2 years 9 weeks ago
Comment id: 1632

Can you show a complex example? particularly if you need to refactor or there are heavy dependencies?

There are some templates

July 1, 2008 by Artem, 2 years 9 weeks ago
Comment id: 1633

There are some templates available. I am going to create video tutorials for them, but not sure when exactly it could happen. Or maybe somebody else could submit them earlier :)

Your templates

August 31, 2008 by POF (not verified), 2 years 2 days ago
Comment id: 1823

Excellent!!

content of backlog query

February 20, 2009 by Suzie (not verified), 1 year 27 weeks ago
Comment id: 2261

Would you usually have on hold products on it?

I prefer using one product

February 20, 2009 by Artem, 1 year 27 weeks ago
Comment id: 2263

I prefer using one *product* backlog per one *product*, but that, certainly, can include the future releases and wish list-like features in the bottom. Actually Product Owners use a strategy of putting even crazy requests to the bottom of the product backlog. It will show that you care if request comes from e.g. your indirect boss, but you still won't ever do it, because you know it will always be of the low priority ;)

Thanks for the template -

February 28, 2009 by Zoran (not verified), 1 year 26 weeks ago
Comment id: 2305

Thanks for the template - simple but effective and a great place to start.

While these templates are

May 29, 2010 by tinggi badan (not verified), 13 weeks 5 days ago
Comment id: 6846

While these templates are indeed useful, I believe, that during transition to Scrum too powerful tools can draw too much attention and force the team and Product Owner to learn tools instead of learning Scrum. The main point of the product backlog is to list the requirements in the strict and unambiguous order.