A product backlog is the prioritized list of features, fixes, improvements, technical debt items, and discovery work a product team plans to deliver. It is owned by the product manager, refined continuously through grooming sessions, and used as the single source of truth for what gets worked on next. It is one of the core artifacts in Scrum and a near-universal tool across modern product teams regardless of framework.
A well-maintained backlog has three structural properties: prioritized (items at the top are the most valuable next things to work on, not just the things added most recently), refined (items near the top are well-defined with acceptance criteria, items further down can be rough), and bounded (the backlog is f...