Product Backlog Vs Sprint Backlog: Key Differences Explained

Backlogs are the backbone of Agile workflows, guiding teams from ideas to execution. But one common pitfall is failing to differentiate between product backlogs and sprint backlogs—a mistake that can lead to misaligned priorities, inefficient sprints, and frustrated teams. While many of us have experience working with backlog management software, misusing these two distinct tools can cause more disruption than clarity.

So, how do we ensure our backlogs work for us, not against us? Understanding their unique roles isn’t just about definitions—it’s about solving common workflow problems and optimizing team collaboration. Let’s break down their differences and explore how to use them effectively.

What Is A Product Backlog?

A short and dumbed-down explanation of what a product backlog is - it’s all of the features and activities that you and your development team plan to work on.

For a more structured definition, let’s refer to Atlassian.

A product backlog is a prioritized list of work for the development team that is derived from the product roadmap and its requirements.

You may have noticed that the folks at Atlassian emphasized two important concepts when defining the backlog.

1. It’s prioritized.

Making a simple list of things to build will result either in a huge mess or a product that is not capable of properly solving your user’s problems. So, a list of features is not really a product backlog unless you prioritize it.

2. It is a derivative of the roadmap.

I have seen so many backlogs that were simply the result of everyone sharing their feature ideas and adding them to the backlog. This results in a mess and a product that looks like Frankenstein's monster. If you want your backlog items to achieve a specific product or business goal, you have to build it based on your roadmap and product vision.

The core purpose of having a backlog in the first place is to create a single source of truth for everyone in the company. There should always be one backlog out there and everyone should refer to it when deciding on what to do next.

Apart from that, product backlog is also a great tool for facilitating prioritization for you and your stakeholders, since you have everything you need to do in the form of a single list.

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What Should a Backlog Include?

Assuming that you’re using one of the Agile frameworks, your product backlog will consist of the following items:

• Epics: Large features that help you reach specific product goals such as increasing conversion, solving a specific user pain, or improving their journey across your product. The commenting feature on Google Docs is an example of this. Epics typically consist of smaller “sub-features” called user stories.
• User Stories: Small features or elements of a feature that are usable for your clients. In the Google Docs feature above, “mentioning someone in a comment” or “resolving a comment” would be typical examples of stories under that Epic.
• Technical Tasks: Pieces of work that your development team has to do that are not related to the features in your backlog. Examples of such tasks are setting up a backup database, refactoring a microservice, or optimizing query speeds.
• Bugs: It’s not a real backlog if there are no bugs in it. No matter how well you develop and test your features, these little parasites will always pop up. So, you have to keep, track, and manage them somewhere. The best practice is to store them in your backlog and prioritize them just like any other backlog item.

This is what a typical product backlog will look like:

P.S. Read our article on 3 examples of a product backlog done right if you are looking for more guidance.

Now, let’s understand the role of the product manager in terms of working with the backlog.

Who Is Responsible for Managing The Backlog?

In short—the product manager is the god of the backlog. They hold the keys to what gets built, in what order, and why. The backlog is their domain, and they are ultimately responsible for ensuring it stays aligned with the product vision, user needs, and business goals.

That doesn’t mean the PM is the only one touching the backlog. Engineers, designers, and other team members may suggest or even add items, but any changes should happen with the PM’s oversight. After all, a chaotic backlog leads to a chaotic product.

A PM’s core backlog responsibilities include:

• Prioritizing the backlog – Ensuring the most valuable and impactful work is tackled first.
• Refining it with the team – Regularly reviewing, updating, and breaking down items to keep work clear and actionable.
• Communicating backlog priorities and changes – Keeping stakeholders informed so there are no surprises.

Because the backlog is a living document, it evolves constantly. New ideas emerge, priorities shift, and some features get cut entirely. This fluidity is a key principle of Agile—the backlog should reflect the latest realities, not a rigid, outdated plan.

A well-managed backlog isn’t just a task list; it’s a strategic tool that helps teams build the right product at the right time. And at the center of it all? The product manager, holding the keys.

Creating and Managing a Product Backlog 101

You start building the initial version of your backlog as soon as your product roadmap is complete. You will usually take all of the significant features and chunks of work from the roadmap and turn them into Epics on the backlog.

Afterward, you start developing your product requirement documents for each one of them and create epics based on the breakdown of functionality inside your PRD.

But, as a natural consequence of product development, you will end up constantly changing these epics, adding standalone stories, and bugs to get a backlog that looks like what most of us work with. I mean, a messy one.

But, it’s fairly easy to maintain your backlog if you.

• Conduct regular backlog grooming sessions.
• Dedicate time in the next sprint to conduct mass bug fixes and clean up your backlog from them.
• Not allowing everyone to add their ideas to the backlog without consulting with you first.
• Constantly prioritizing your backlog.
• Using user story mapping to have a clear overview of what needs to be done.

Regarding the last one, here are two main prioritization techniques that I would suggest you use based on my extensive experience of trying out a dozen of them.

MoSCoW

This is a fairly simple technique that groups elements on the backlog into these three categories:

• Must-have: When the feature is part of a core user journey and you can’t solve their pains without it. For instance, Spotify playlists are a must-have.
• Should-have: A significant enhancement to the user journey. In the case of Spotify, it would be the ability to search for pre-made playlists for your mood or activity.
• Could-have: Something that is delightful to the user but the absence of it is not a dealbreaker. Spotify would use gestures to change the song instead of buttons.
• Won’t-have: Features or initiatives that you, your stakeholders, or your team deemed useless during grooming or prioritization meetings.

As you can see, MoSCoW is a fairly simple technique. And that’s one of the reasons I like using it because it’s very easy to explain to everyone in the room and get them to use it too when picking low or high-priority tasks out of the list of items you’re working on.

Kano

Another simple technique that lets you look at the features in question from the perspective of your users’ needs. Here, you group your features into these categories:

• Basic Needs: The absence of it is a dealbreaker for the user. In a hotel room, it would be the presence of clean sheets on the bed.
• Performance Needs: Features, the amount or presence of which directly increase user satisfaction. That’s the interior design of the hotel room or the presence of laundry or breakfast services.
• Excitement Needs: The absence of these will not decrease satisfaction. But their presence will certainly increase it. That’s the cute towel swan origami on your bed in the hotel room.

Here’s a chart that illustrates the relationship of these types of features with user satisfaction in Kano.

To sum up, the product backlog is the to-do list of the team that the product manager (or the product team) creates and maintains using a wide variety of backlog management tools and techniques.

What Is a Sprint Backlog?

Now that the nature of the product backlog itself is clear to us, let’s understand what the sprint backlog is about (hint: it doesn't involve exercise.)

Scrum.org defines sprint backlog as the subset of the product backlog that the scrum team has picked to finish during the upcoming sprint. In the scrum framework, it is one of the core scrum artifacts that the entire team works with.

As the definition suggests, the core purpose of the sprint backlog is to clearly define the scope of work that the team needs to focus on during the sprint.

The process of building the sprint backlog usually happens during the sprint planning meeting. Here, you will typically see the following activities:

1. The product manager defines the goal of the sprint.
2. The team starts picking an achievable list of deliverables that can help them achieve this goal.
3. The team breaks the stories down into technical tasks and estimates them.
4. They look at their capacity and velocity from past sprints to validate that the sprint backlog is achievable.

Unlike the product backlog, where the PM is the sole owner, the responsibility of creating and maintaining the sprint backlog goes to the scrum team. As they are the people doing the tasks required to build the features, they are the best people to decide on the size and the scope of the sprint backlog.

Unlike many other scrum artifacts, that some teams might decide to ignore (that’s perfectly fine, you adopt scrum to your team and not the other way around) sprint backlog seems to be the one that almost everyone uses. There are good reasons behind it. Specifically, sprint backlog gives you:

• Scope clarity: The team has a proper understanding of the work they are expected to do during the next iteration.
• Improved focus: With a clear work scope and a scrum master who’s fighting against everyone’s attempts to add new tasks to the sprint, the team does not have to focus on anything but the items in the sprint backlog.
• Better progress tracking: As there are no items entering or leaving the sprint backlog, it is fairly easy to see how well your team is progressing towards the sprint goal.

Regarding the 3rd point, most Agile tools have built-in sprint reporting tools that automatically track your team’s progress for you. One of the most popular reports for doing so is the burndown chart.

This chart consists of two lines that trend downwards. The gray line is the hypothetical ideal progress of your team. The red line, on the other hand, is the actual progress. Jira (the tool shown in the screenshot) measures these lines based on the total amount of story points left for your team to complete. So, when someone closes a task, the red line drops with an amount equal to the estimated story points of that task.

Creating and Managing a Sprint Backlog

The process of creating a sprint backlog begins with a product backlog that is not groomed yet. Product owners conduct regular backlog refinement meetings (a.k.a. grooming) where the team:

• Ask the PM questions about the design and requirements to have a clear understanding of what the product team expects them to build.
• Challenges some of the points in the requirements if it is time-consuming to make or will result in technical difficulties.
• Assign ownership for each item on the backlog to the teammate that they think fits the best for that particular task.
• Estimates the size of the task/story using one of the popular techniques such as Fibonacci numbers paired with planning poker.

Assuming that the team has groomed enough tasks for the next iteration, the team will do a sprint planning meeting where they commit to a certain amount of tasks from the product backlog. The moment the team commits to it and starts the sprint, this group of tasks becomes the sprint backlog.

For managing the sprint backlog, the Agile methodology provides us with several tools, including:

• Daily standups where each team member shows their progress to the team and reports any impediments that slow them down.
• Burn up and burn down charts that visualize the overall progress of the team.
• Demo meetings at the end of the spring when the team showcases the results of their work to the product team and gets actionable feedback on the design and functionality of the features they have built.

Finally, you have the retrospective meetings. They don’t directly help you manage your sprint backlog, but you get to discuss the processes that will improve the quality and efficiency of managing one.

Key Differences Between Product Backlogs And Sprint Backlogs

To better understand the differences between these seemingly similar concepts, let me give you a side-by-side overview of how they differ, then I'll explain each element in more detail.

While the overview itself can easily explain how they are different, you might still have questions about specific aspects. So, let me go over them one by one.

Time Frame: Product backlogs represent your mid to long-term plan as they reflect your product roadmap and vision. So, the planning horizon for it can vary from several sprints to a couple of years.

Spring backlogs, on the other hand, have a very short timeframe as they represent the items that your team plans to deliver in the next sprint (usually lasting 1-4 weeks).

Ownership: As we already mentioned, the end responsible person for the product backlog is someone from the product team (usually the product owner assigned to that team). The Scrum team can contribute to the backlog, but they can only do that through the PM.

The situation is different with the sprint backlog. The only way a PM can affect it is by setting the sprint goal. Apart from that, it is the scrum team who has the authority to create and manage it.

Level of detail: As the elements in a product backlog can represent the work of several quarters or even years, it is not realistic for the PM to have every element described in detail. In fact, I highly discourage it since there’s always a chance that you will end up deleting many features from it and it would be a waste of time to have them meticulously described.

Usually, you would have a high level of detail for the elements with the highest priority, and a rough description for everything else.

For the stories to enter the sprint backlog, however, they have to include all the details out there. Otherwise, the scrum team will refuse to implement the stories if they don’t have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them.

Purpose: Product backlog is the “middle man” between highly vague strategic plans and highly specific technical implementation details. It serves as your tool to express your strategic plans in the form of a to-do list.

Sprint backlogs, on the other hand, are highly tactical in their nature and aim to provide the team with a clear short-term action plan and scope.

Flexibility: Product backlogs are living documents that change all the time. Considering their long-term nature, they have no choice but to change based on the new priorities, user feedback, and market conditions in order for your product to stay viable.

Sprint backlogs are the polar opposite of that. While I highly encourage you to constantly evolve the product backlog, changing the elements in a sprint backlog is a big no-no as you will end up breaking all of the commitments and plans of your team.

How The Product Backlog And Sprint Backlog Work Together

As mentioned, the sprint backlog is the more precise and clarified subset of the product backlog. You still consider it part of the backlog till the moment your current sprint is over. After that, the completed stories leave the backlog and the incomplete ones re-enter it at the top of the priority list.

So, in terms of the flow of features between these two backlogs, you might not only populate the sprint one with items from the product backlog but do the opposite too.

No matter which way the stories go, ensuring a smooth handoff is key. Here’s what I suggest you pay attention to:

• Whatever enters the sprint backlog should contain open questions for the scrum team. Otherwise, you will become a blocker to the sprint progress. The best way to manage this is to create a Definition of Ready (DoR) list together with your team and follow it.
• Everything entering the sprint backlog should have estimates. Otherwise, the commitments and plans of your team will be incorrect. It would be hard to use burndown charts to monitor the progress too.
• When building the sprint backlog, always clearly ask the team if they are comfortable with the load. People tend to overload themselves and end up with half-done sprints.
• When taking incomplete items out of the sprint at its end, always follow up about it in the retrospective meeting. This way, you can find the process inefficiency and eliminate it.

Overall, this is what the entire process looks like.

Apart from tips on connecting these two together, let me help you properly manage both with a couple of best practices from my experience.

Best Practices for Product Backlog Management

Owning a product backlog can either be delightful or terrible based on how well you manage it. Here’s what I do based on years of experience:

• Constant cleanups: Find the courage to remove items from the backlog that are very unlikely to make it to development.
• Stakeholder communication: Do regular high-level prioritization meetings with your stakeholders. This way, the plan in their mind aligns with what you have on the backlog.
• Separate list for items with questionable future: Sometimes you or your stakeholder will come up with ideas that might or might not be built. To avoid cluttering your backlog with them, keep them in a separate list somewhere. Only add them to the backlog when you know that you’re going to build them.

Finally, I suggest you take advantage of the many tools and templates out there for a product backlog to speed up the creation process. Here’s a bunch from ClickUp that you can use.

In case you want to read about more product best practices, I suggest you check out our dedicated guide on it.

Best Practices for Spring Backlog Management

Sprint backlog represents the scope of a specific increment. So, the tips for managing it properly are a bit different:

• Avoid overplanning: Humans are terrible at estimating their abilities. If your team commits to a considerably larger spring backlog than before, you want to help them remove a couple of items from it.
• Handle blockers daily: I have never seen a smooth sprint during my career (consisting of hundreds of them). Blockers will always arise. And, if you don’t handle them immediately, the chances of you completing the sprint plummets. So, pay close attention to what your team reports during daily standups.
• Use specialized tools: The internet is full of software made to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your Agile processes. Take advantage of them.

Regarding the last point, here are a couple of tools with all the must-have features that you can consider using.

Atlassian Jira: Feature-rich Agile tool for complex workflows and large teams.

Trello: Lightweight task management tool with Agile plugins (Kanban and Scrum) that is best for small startup teams.

Monday.com: It stands between Jira and Trello. It’s feature-rich but easily supports lightweight processes and small teams.

For more, be sure to check out our list of best product management tools.

Common Pitfalls And Challenges of Backlog Management

I have lost count of the miserable failures I have had managing my backlogs throughout my career. While making mistakes is inevitable (that’s how you learn), I still want to point out a couple of significant ones with the hopes that you will avoid them (unlike me).

Being a know-it-all: This is especially valid when you’re a junior (hello Dunning-Kruger effect). You read a couple of articles about managing backlogs and think that you know how to do it better than anyone else. It almost always leads to a big screw-up. So, if there are more experienced product managers around, don’t hesitate to ask for their help. Alternatively, you can also check out the examples of product backlogs done right.

Stopping to learn: The world of Agile evolves rapidly. If you stop learning about new practices and tools, you end up facing problems that have fresh solutions out there. So, sign up for courses or webinars on Agile and subscribe to our newsletter for lots of product management resources and guides.

Thinking that PMs are not part of the Agile team: If you think that PMs have nothing to do with the items inside the sprint, you will most likely fail most of your sprints. There are always product-related questions and clarifications that arise during the implementation of stories. The faster you resolve them, the better quality outcome you will have at the sprint review.

Everything is a priority and the deadline was yesterday: Also known as “the CEO disease”, this is a sign that your backlog lacks priority. An easy way to mitigate this is to have the courage and tell your CEO “No, we don’t have the capacity, please tell me which one is more important”. Believe me, most of the CEOs will hear you and give you a clear priority.

FAQs

What is the difference between a product backlog and a sprint backlog?

Product backlog is an ever-evolving list of features representing your strategy and long-term development plans. Sprint backlogs, on the other hand, are subsets of the product backlog that the team is ready to tackle during the upcoming sprint. Unlike product backlogs, they are tactical in nature and fixed in scope.

Who is responsible for the product backlog?

Product managers are the people responsible for creating, managing, and taking responsibility for everything happening with the product backlog.

How often should the product backlog be updated?

A good rule of thumb is to have weekly product backlog refinement meetings to update the story breakdown and monthly prioritization meetings to change feature priorities on the backlog.

Can sprint backlogs change during the sprint?

I don’t recommend you do that unless it’s an emergency. Changing the sprint backlog will decrease the chances of your team delivering it as they did not commit to the items you added.

How do product backlogs and sprint backlogs work together?

The scrum team refines the top priority tasks on the product backlog during a grooming meeting. Then they conduct a sprint planning meeting where they transfer items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog, estimate them, and commit to finishing them by the end of the sprint.