Idea Funnel Backlog
Prioritise and focus your backlog while keeping ideas fluid.
About the Idea Funnel Backlog Template
An idea funnel backlog can help you and your team prioritize a list of features, bugs, technical work, and knowledge building. These are elements you should identify and keep updated to make your product or service more functional.
Treat your idea funnel backlog as both a roadmap and backlog. The combination of a Kanban Board and backlog helps you and your team prioritize as you approach near-term or end-of-quarter dates.
Although you can work on a product backlog and 5-day design sprint process separately, this template conveniently combines the two artifacts.
What is an idea funnel backlog?
An idea funnel backlog allows product managers to convert their idea pool into a product backlog, to inform planned feature implementations or user stories.
Product backlogs typically comprise three layers:
Raw requests and ideas (sourced from customer support, product owners, or product teams)
User stories (converted from requests or ideas by a product owner, based on current product strategy or request popularity)
Planned state for user stories (these live on a Kanban Board)
An idea funnel backlog can help you pick new ideas to prioritize for your next sprint. Ideally, the funnel structure helps you turn a large number of ideas into manageable, relevant stories or features to implement.
Teams needing a framework to get out of a reactive sprint planning cycle or task-focused thinking can benefit from an idea funnel backlog. The structure helps teams focus on longer-term goals to gain predictability in tackling idea backlogs.
When to use the idea funnel backlog template
An idea funnel backlog can benefit product teams who need help:
Maintaining costs: queues of unvalidated ideas can often become costly, so product teams need to groom and prioritize backlogs regularly.
Focusing on high-value tasks: prioritizing your ideas leads you to work on user stories or features with potentially more significant impact — and minimizes ideas not being actioned.
Encouraging innovation: try to balance validating ideas with maintaining the potential value of anything behind the queue, and not forgetting anything going to the back of the queue.
How to use the idea funnel backlog template
Making your own idea funnel backlogs is easy with Miro's template. Get started by selecting the idea funnel backlog template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Start adding user stories or product features to your backlog. Click the Sticky Note icon on the toolbar or press “N” on your keyboard to enable the tool, to add more Sticky Notes. Don’t worry about prioritizing for this first step — your main goal is to add your team’s relevant ideas to the board as needed.
Give each of your ideas an age limit. For your user story or product feature backlog to stay relevant and timely, agree with your team on an expiration date (for example, three months). If an idea isn’t prioritized in the timeframe, it should disappear from your list over time.
Prioritize your “Must Do” tasks. On this default template, tasks can be organized by “Could Do,” “Should Do,” and “Must Do.” Does your team have their own way to describe and categorize user stories and features? Perhaps “Later,” “Soon,” “Next,” “Now”? Edit the text boxes with your preferred wording.
Add your most urgent or popular backlog items to the sprint area. Add your “Must Do” items to the sprint area on the board, and tackle them in order of “Next,” “Doing,” “Done.”
Continue to maintain your backlog and prioritize through rapid growth periods. This funnel is your idea management system: it keeps your team aligned and sharing a centralized place for tangible, validated customer feedback, prioritized product feature ideas, and committed product roadmap items for a development pipeline.
Get started with this template right now.
Define A Winning Product Vision
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Define A Winning Product Vision template assists product teams in articulating compelling visions for product development. By defining goals, target markets, and differentiation strategies, this template aligns teams around a shared vision for success. With sections for outlining product features, benefits, and value propositions, it communicates the essence of the product effectively. This template serves as a guiding light for product development efforts, inspiring creativity and focus as teams work towards bringing the product vision to life.
Product Brief Brainstorm Template
Works best for:
Product , Product Management
The Intelligent Product Brief Brainstorm template in Miro is crafted to supercharge your product development process. One standout benefit of this template is its AI-powered capabilities that elevate your brainstorming sessions. Not only does it help in organizing and capturing ideas, but it also provides additional insights and solutions, ensuring a thorough and innovative approach to problem-solving. This intelligent feature significantly cuts down the time spent on synthesizing information, allowing teams to concentrate on refining and implementing the best ideas, ultimately leading to more effective and efficient product development.
UML Diagram Template
Works best for:
Diagrams, Software Development
Originally used as a modeling language in software engineering, UML has become a popular approach to application structures and documenting software. UML stands for Unified Modeling Language, and you can use it to model business processes and workflows. Like flowcharts, UML diagrams can provide your organization with a standardized method of mapping out step-by-step processes. They allow your team to easily view the relationships between systems and tasks. UML diagrams are an effective tool that can help you bring new employees up to speed, create documentation, organize your workplace and team, and streamline your projects.
Epic & Feature Roadmap Planning
Epic & Feature Roadmap Planning template facilitates the breakdown of large-scale initiatives into manageable features and tasks. It helps teams prioritize development efforts based on business impact and strategic objectives. By visualizing the relationship between epics and features, teams can effectively plan releases and ensure alignment with overall project goals and timelines.
Timeline Workflow by Reza Zolf
Works best for:
Planning, Strategy
The Timeline Workflow template helps streamline your project workflows. It’s perfect for visualizing processes, identifying bottlenecks, and optimizing tasks. This template enhances team collaboration and ensures smooth project execution.
Instance Scheduler on AWS Template
Works best for:
AWS
The Instance Scheduler on AWS template is a strategic tool designed to enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of managing AWS resources. It serves as a guide for automating the scheduling of Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances, ensuring that these resources are operational only when necessary. This approach not only simplifies the management of instance schedules but also significantly reduces cloud computing costs by avoiding unnecessary runtime.