Before we start to discuss ways to create and manage your Backlog, let’s give a definition to it and understand why we need one? 

Backlog is a set of all ideas, desires, requests, suggestions related to your project or product. This board is the future of your project. That’s where you decide what to build and develop next, what can be done to get more profit, what you can do for your clients or how to achieve your goals. At the same time you structure all of your ideas and highlight those that you think are the most valuable and profitable one. For those who are familiar with Scrum methodology, the board can be used to rate tasks for future Sprint iterations. Backlog is more useful than you think as you define how your project will be going on it. 

With Backlog you will quickly create a project plan and understand in what direction to go further. It’s complicated to consider the wishes of all interested parties. Backlog helps you to gather all of it in a way that you will see which of them is more urgent and has more weight over the other one.

Backlog is represented by Kanban board in Hygger. To create it you need to click on the plus icon on the header. 

You will see the list of board types, choose the Kanban one and name it “Backlog”.

If you create a blank board you will have an empty board with three columns - To Do, In Progress and Done. Use the template “Product Backlog” to see how your Backlog can look like. 

Don’t forget about columns and swimlanes that we teach you on Course№2. Lesson 2. Columns can represent the stages of your work(Approved, In Development, In review, To rate), the same as separate them (projects plan from the feature requests, rated requests from not rated, customers insights from the team’s ideas). The first column can be used to gather all your requests, insights and feedback.  

Meanwhile, swimlanes can group your cards(tasks in Hygger) by projects (Project A, Project B), by type of application( web app, Android app, iOS app, and Public API), by the number of company members(start-up, 50-100, 100-500) and etc. 

Once you create columns with swimlanes and create tasks for your ideas, you can start prioritizing it. To do it you need to switch on the prioritization which we will discuss in the next lesson.