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Improvements to Backlog Management in Shortcut
The Backlog in Shortcut gives teams a dedicated space to plan and prioritize feedback, upcoming project requirements, and ideas. We have spent the last few months releasing improvements that make it even easier to move work from the early ideation phase through to ready to be pulled into an Iteration or Epic.
Organize and plan your work to give everyone in your team confidence that the work they are scheduling from the backlog is ready.
It's now easier to see more Stories in a single view for quicker prioritization decisions.
As teams prioritize Stories it's easier to see more in a single view without needing to go to a separate page. We've introduced a new Load More Stories option to enable loading all Stories. Whether you manually sort, group by a specific area, or filter, the Load More option is available!
Being able to organize work in a single view provides flexibility to move all Stories instead of only what you can see in a single page of results.
📚💡Bring up the Backlog view when getting ready to plan priorities for a team refinement session.
As a Product Manager, I work with my Engineering Manager prior to these sessions to group the Backlog by high priority work related to Epics on our Roadmap. We work together to review these Stories, double-check the scope is clear, and manually rank the Stories by order we want to discuss them with the team. Any New Stories are reviewed and set to a state to signal we're ready to discuss, estimate, and prioritize into an upcoming Iteration.
This keeps our Backlog view focused only on not yet discussed work so our Engineering team workflows stay focused on our top priorities.
We've also added quicker ways to move Stories within a workflow. When sorting by the manual ordering option (far left on the table) there are now new right-click Story options. These offer improved prioritization with the ability to:
- Move any Story to the top of the workflow or the bottom so you don't have to click-hold-drag the Story up and down across dozens of Stories
- Move Stories to your current or upcoming iteration with ease, to make planning the next highest priorities efficient with a single-click
📚💡After adding estimates and reviewing work as a team, use the right-click menu to easily move the now ready for development work into a planned iteration!
More information available about each Story to make informed decisions
Different stakeholders organize the Backlog in different ways, depending on whether you're looking at Stories related to already defined scope, or fresh ideas. We wanted to enhance Story information available to allow all stakeholders to toggle on/off views and Story details meaningful to their workflows.
In the Backlog there are new Display options for:
- The Created and Last Updated dates for a Story to help identify the staleness of a Story
- Story Labels to identify a Story's theme or grouping
- Workflow to see whether it's already prioritized for upcoming work or in an ideation phase
And, a new filter has been added to identify Stories by Requester to easily find Stories you or others have created.
📚💡 As a Product Manager I capture a lot of customer feedback on a daily basis related to new problem areas, ongoing Roadmap items, or recently released work. As I discuss weekly plans with my Design counterpart, I'll use the Backlog to review newly captured feedback and discuss opportunities where we can further dive in.
To do this, I filter by Requester is Me, apply the Epics of planned but not yet prioritized work, add the user feedback label, and group by Epic! This provides a great view of recently captured user feedback for us to jam on and create new concepts for team review in a central location that doesn't disrupt delivery work in our Iterations.
Quicker to prioritize and work with Stories
In addition to the new prioritization options, filters, and richer data available for Stories in the Backlog we have also improved the Markdown experience with Stories to help save your team time as you organize. If you haven't seen what's new, read more about the improved Markdown experience here.
