What is it:The main tool of a Product Owner is a backlog where all the user stories, ideas, tasks and requests are collected. Some backlogs are good and have beautiful user stories with acceptance criteria, and other backlogs are not great and filled with nothing but feature requests. The quality of a backlog is a topic for a different discussion, but I do believe that as long the team has at least a backlog with
something, they’re onto something and are not hopeless.
The PO has to prioritize backlog as frequently as they can and always have clarity about what comes first and what comes next. That said, we only care about the top of backlog, so don’t try to arrange every single thing on it - the priorities will change hundred times before we get to the bottom, so do yourself a favor and don’t waste your time
Antipatterns:- There are two or more backlogs for 1 team (even if the team supports two or more products, there should always be 1 backlog per team so that everyone know what is the next important thing to work on
- Backlog is a formality (or doesn’t exist at all) - PO just tells people what to work on next
- PO has a list of “priority #1” items and everything is super urgent
- PO doesn’t give any directions about priorities to the team and lets them decide what to pick up