TL;DR
In Craft.io, your backlog contains all work for a workspace or product area. As the backlog grows, you don’t manage it by creating separate lists or copies.
Instead, you organize and focus on the right work using views, grouping, sorting, filtering, and fields - allowing you to work with the same backlog from different perspectives depending on the task at hand.
Follow these steps:
What your product backlog represents
A backlog in Craft.io represents the full set of work for a workspace or product area, including:
Committed or in progress work
Planned work
Future ideas and opportunities
As products evolve, backlogs grow. Craft.io provides tools to keep the backlog structured, navigable, and easy to work with at different levels of detail.
The Product Backlog view in Craft.io
The Product Backlog view is the primary place to build, view, and organize your backlog. It presents your backlog as a hierarchical table, making it easy to:
Understand how items are structured across Products, Epics and Features
Expand and collapse hierarchy levels as needed
Create new items directly within the hierarchy
View and edit additional fields as table columns
Teams typically return to this view for backlog setup, regular refinement sessions, and structural changes. Custom fields can also be surfaced here as columns, allowing teams to maintain key planning information alongside the backlog structure.
Grouping items in the backlog view
Grouping helps you organize backlog items into meaningful buckets so you can review them more systematically.
Instead of scanning a long flat list, grouping allows you to see how work is distributed across a specific dimension. This is especially useful during backlog reviews, prioritization sessions, or when aligning with stakeholders.
Common ways teams group backlog items include:
By Product, to review scope and ownership across product areas
By Status, to understand what is planned, in progress, or blocked
By Owner or Team, to clarify responsibility and balance workload
By Category or Theme, to assess investment across different focus areas
In addition to standard fields, teams often use custom fields as grouping criteria to reflect how they categorize work internally.
Sorting items in the backlog view
While grouping helps you understand structure, sorting helps you understand priority and sequence.
Sorting is most useful when deciding what to review first or what requires attention now. Teams often sort backlog items by:
Priority or Rank
Value or Impact
Readiness or Confidence
Creation or Update date
Sorting is usually temporary and context-specific. The same backlog may be sorted differently depending on the discussion or activity, including by custom scoring or prioritization fields where relevant.
Filtering items in the backlog view
Filtering helps you narrow the backlog to a relevant subset of work.
While grouping and sorting organize what you see, filtering defines what is included at all. Filtering is most useful when focusing on a specific product area, team, or type of decision.
Teams often filter backlog items by:
Product
Owner or Team (e.g. assigned to me or my team)
Status
Category
Custom fields such as Priority, Value, or Confidence
Filtering is commonly used to prepare for planning sessions, backlog reviews, or stakeholder discussions. The same backlog may be filtered differently depending on the goal of the conversation.
What comes next?
Once you are comfortable organizing and working with your backlog, the next step is adapting Craft.io to your workflow.
In the next article, you will learn how to:
Create and manage custom fields
Customize statuses and categories
Model dependencies between items
These capabilities allow your backlog to fully reflect how work flows in your organization.
👉 Checkout the next article in this collection: Custom Fields, Statuses & Dependencies