Agile Mindset for Manufacturers: Managing the Product Backlog

The Action Engineering team embraces an Agile mindset & Scrum practices in our work.
In our Agile articles, we share tips & coaching opportunities that work well for us. 

Have you ever heard a team member grumbling about the sprint planning meeting not being productive because there is nothing in the backlog? Or maybe you’ve thought this yourself! If this is the case, the Product Owner might need a refresher on the workflow and delivery cadence.

• You want to start working on and refining the backlog for the next sprint as soon as possible after the current sprint starts. This gives you adequate time to write high-quality user stories and acceptance criteria – there is nothing worse than running out of time. Just give the backlog a quick sanity check before the next sprint review to ensure that everything still makes sense.

• Refinement of the product backlog and sprint backlog is an ongoing activity. The best practice is to have 1½ to 2 sprints’ worth of user stories in the product backlog, because you don’t want a team to go into a planning session and discover they’re willing to commit to more work than there is queued up. The Product Owner might be stuck on defining tough user stories.

• Spread the fun and engage a partner or the whole team in writing user stories. User stories help shift the focus from writing about requirements to actually talking about them, so don’t be afraid to make user story writing a group activity.

• Who actually writes the user story is less important that the conversations that are had around the functionality that the user story describes!

If you need think that your product backlog needs an overhaul, send us a message! Let’s get DEEP with our product backlogs.