PMP lesson · Agile Practices · Backlog and stories · lesson 1 of 3 · about 7 minutes
The product backlog and refinement
Agile and hybridFree preview
Goal: After this lesson you can describe a healthy backlog (DEEP), order it by value, risk and cost of delay, and run backlog refinement.
1The situation
A backlog nobody understands
The MES project's backlog has 300 items. Some are one-line wishes from two years ago, some are duplicates, and the items at the top are as vague as the ones at the bottom. Every sprint planning takes four hours of questions.
The backlog is the team's single source of work. When it is messy, everything downstream is slow.
2What the backlog is
The product backlog is the ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product. The product owner owns it and its order; the team helps refine it.
Ordered
By the product owner
Value, risk, dependencies, cost of delay.
Refined
Continuously
Split, clarify, estimate items before they are needed.
Emergent
Changes
Items are added, removed and re-ordered as we learn.
A healthy backlog is DEEP: detailed appropriately, estimated, emergent, prioritised.
3The backlog iceberg
Small and detailed at the top, rough and large at the bottom.
4How it looks on the exam
Exam-style question 1. The product owner uses weighted shortest job first. Feature A: cost of delay 30, size 10. Feature B: 20 and 4. Feature C: 40 and 20. Feature D: 12 and 3. Which feature should be scheduled FIRST?
A. C, highest cost of delay
B. D, smallest
C. A, balanced
D. B, highest ratio of cost of delay to size
Show the answer and the decode
Answer: D.
In simple English
Four features with value and size.
What is the question really asking?
Which first by WSJF.
Key words / trigger
“weighted shortest job first”
PMP logic
A = 3, B = 5, C = 2, D = 4 → B first.
Why the wrong answer looks attractive
C has the highest value but also the biggest size.
5Remember this
Your memory card
Backlog = ordered list of all product work; PO owns the order
Healthy backlog = DEEP
Refine continuously: clarify, split, estimate before planning
Order by value, risk, dependencies, cost of delay (WSJF)
The full lesson in the PMCLEAR app also has:
the rest of the lesson (Backlog refinement, Ordering the backlog)