Idea Funnel Backlog
Prioritise and focus your backlog while keeping ideas fluid.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Idea Funnel Backlog Template
An idea funnel backlog can help you and your team prioritize a list of features, bugs, technical work, and knowledge building. These are elements you should identify and keep updated to make your product or service more functional.
Treat your idea funnel backlog as both a roadmap and backlog. The combination of a Kanban Board and backlog helps you and your team prioritize as you approach near-term or end-of-quarter dates.
Although you can work on a product backlog and 5-day design sprint process separately, this template conveniently combines the two artifacts.
What is an idea funnel backlog?
An idea funnel backlog allows product managers to convert their idea pool into a product backlog, to inform planned feature implementations or user stories.
Product backlogs typically comprise three layers:
Raw requests and ideas (sourced from customer support, product owners, or product teams)
User stories (converted from requests or ideas by a product owner, based on current product strategy or request popularity)
Planned state for user stories (these live on a Kanban Board)
An idea funnel backlog can help you pick new ideas to prioritize for your next sprint. Ideally, the funnel structure helps you turn a large number of ideas into manageable, relevant stories or features to implement.
Teams needing a framework to get out of a reactive sprint planning cycle or task-focused thinking can benefit from an idea funnel backlog. The structure helps teams focus on longer-term goals to gain predictability in tackling idea backlogs.
When to use the idea funnel backlog template
An idea funnel backlog can benefit product teams who need help:
Maintaining costs: queues of unvalidated ideas can often become costly, so product teams need to groom and prioritize backlogs regularly.
Focusing on high-value tasks: prioritizing your ideas leads you to work on user stories or features with potentially more significant impact — and minimizes ideas not being actioned.
Encouraging innovation: try to balance validating ideas with maintaining the potential value of anything behind the queue, and not forgetting anything going to the back of the queue.
How to use the idea funnel backlog template
Making your own idea funnel backlogs is easy with Miro's template. Get started by selecting the idea funnel backlog template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Start adding user stories or product features to your backlog. Click the Sticky Note icon on the toolbar or press “N” on your keyboard to enable the tool, to add more Sticky Notes. Don’t worry about prioritizing for this first step — your main goal is to add your team’s relevant ideas to the board as needed.
Give each of your ideas an age limit. For your user story or product feature backlog to stay relevant and timely, agree with your team on an expiration date (for example, three months). If an idea isn’t prioritized in the timeframe, it should disappear from your list over time.
Prioritize your “Must Do” tasks. On this default template, tasks can be organized by “Could Do,” “Should Do,” and “Must Do.” Does your team have their own way to describe and categorize user stories and features? Perhaps “Later,” “Soon,” “Next,” “Now”? Edit the text boxes with your preferred wording.
Add your most urgent or popular backlog items to the sprint area. Add your “Must Do” items to the sprint area on the board, and tackle them in order of “Next,” “Doing,” “Done.”
Continue to maintain your backlog and prioritize through rapid growth periods. This funnel is your idea management system: it keeps your team aligned and sharing a centralized place for tangible, validated customer feedback, prioritized product feature ideas, and committed product roadmap items for a development pipeline.
Get started with this template right now.
Flyer Maker Template
Works best for:
Design, Marketing
Whether it’s a client party or a nonprofit fundraiser, your event needs one key thing to be a smashing success: people to show up. That’s why promoting it is such an important part of the planning—and creating and sending a flyer is the first step. These single-page files will grab your guests’ attention and give them the key details, such as the time, date, and location (and if it’s a fundraiser, who/what the funds will benefit). This template will let you lay out text and customize a flyer design.
Service Blueprint Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Operations, Market Research
First introduced by G. Lynn Shostack in 1984, service blueprints allow you to visualize the steps that go into a service process from the customer’s perspective. Service blueprints are useful tools for understanding and designing a service experience – and finding ways to improve it. Service blueprint diagrams make it simpler for teams to design new processes or improve existing ones. To create a service blueprint, map out each process and actor that contributes to the customer experience, from in-house contributors to third-party vendors.
Timeline Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Flowcharts, Project Planning
A timeline displays a chronological order of important dates, and scheduled events. Timelines help product managers, project managers, and team members tell visual stories about progress and obstacles. Timelines enable teams to see at a glance what happened before, what progress is happening now, and what needs tackling in the future. Projects or products with specific purpose or deliverables should be based on a timeline to be successful. Use the timeline as a shared reference for start dates, end dates, and milestones.
App Wireframe Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Wireframes
Ready to start building an app? Don’t just imagine how it will function and how users will interact with it—let a wireframe show you. Wireframing is a technique for creating a basic layout of each screen. When you wireframe, ideally early in the process, you’ll gain an understanding of what each screen will accomplish and get buy-in from important stakeholders—all before adding the design and content, which will save you time and money. And by thinking of things in terms of a user’s journey, you’ll deliver a more compelling, successful experience.
How Now Wow Matrix Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Product Management, Prioritization
There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm — but some are more original and easier to implement. The How Now Wow matrix is a tool that helps you identify and organize those great ideas, as well as reinvigorates your team to think creatively and take risks (a taller order as you scale). Grab this template to create your own matrix, then rank the ideas you generated in a brainstorm as “How” (difficult to implement), “Now” (easy to implement), or “Wow” (both original and easy to implement).
Weekly Planner Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Project Planning
A weekly planner is a schedule that outlines your plans and activities for the week ahead. It helps you manage your time, keep track of your tasks, and organize your team on a day-to-day basis. Unlike traditional planners, which are often non-customizable, this weekly planner can be modified to suit your specific needs.