Scrum Artifacts

Scrum has three artifacts. Each represents work or value, and each is anchored by a commitment that gives it focus and transparency.

Product Backlog

An ordered list of what is needed to improve the product. The single source of work for the Scrum Team. Always evolving — items added, removed, re-ordered, refined.

Properties

• Owned by the Product Owner. They alone change the order.
• Ordered. Not just prioritised — uniquely ordered. The top item is what's coming next.
• Refined progressively. Top items are small, clear, ready; bottom items can be vague, large, and speculative.
• Visible. Stakeholders and the team can see the current state.

The Product Goal

A longer-term objective the team is working toward. The Product Backlog is everything currently believed necessary to reach that goal. The team commits to the Product Goal — at any moment, only one is in flight.

Examples:

• "Reach 100,000 weekly active users in the EU market."
• "Reduce average page load time below 1 second on mobile."
• "Be SOC 2 Type II compliant by year end."

Sprint Backlog

The plan for the Sprint. Composed of:

1. The Sprint Goal (the why).
2. The selected Product Backlog items (the what).
3. An actionable plan to deliver them (the how).

Properties

• Owned by the Developers. They update it daily; they decide how to organise the work.
• Always reflects current understanding. If the team learns a task is bigger or simpler than expected, the Sprint Backlog changes.
• Visible. Usually a board with columns: To Do, In Progress, Done.

The Sprint Goal

One sentence. Captures the Sprint's purpose. Provides flexibility about exactly which items to deliver — the team negotiates with the Product Owner if scope must shift to meet the goal.

Examples:

• "Reduce checkout abandonment on mobile."
• "Make the dashboard load under 1 second."
• "Roll out SSO to enterprise customers."

Notice how the goal is broader than any one ticket. Multiple items combine to advance it.

Increment

The output of the Sprint — a usable, integrated step toward the Product Goal. An Increment must:

• Meet the Definition of Done.
• Be usable — not just code committed, but a working, releasable thing.
• Add to all prior Increments. Multiple Increments may be created within a Sprint.

The Definition of Done

A formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the quality required for the product. It is what makes "done" objective.

Typical DoD entries for a SaaS team:

• Code reviewed and merged to main.
• Unit tests written and passing.
• Integration tests pass in CI.
• No known critical bugs.
• Documentation updated where user-facing.
• Feature flag in place for rollback.
• Deployed to staging and validated.
• Telemetry in place to verify in production.

If an item does not meet the DoD, it is not part of the Increment. It returns to the Product Backlog.

Why a strong DoD matters

• Transparency. Stakeholders trust "done" to mean releasable.
• Quality. Prevents technical debt from compounding silently.
• Predictability. Estimates are based on items that meet DoD; weak DoD inflates apparent velocity.

Backlog Item Types

The Scrum Guide is silent on item types. Common conventions:

• User Story — a unit of business value from a user perspective. The next lesson covers these.
• Bug — defect to fix.
• Spike — time-boxed investigation to learn something needed before estimating.
• Technical task — refactor, infra change, dependency upgrade.
• Epic — a large body of work, typically broken into stories.

The Product Owner orders all of these together. The team should not be doing tech work that has no place in the backlog.

Refinement Tips

• Keep top of backlog at "Ready" — small, clear, estimated.
• Use INVEST as a quality bar: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable.
• Limit the visible backlog. Items aged out of relevance should be removed, not piled higher.
• Refinement is ongoing — typically 5–10% of the team's capacity each Sprint.

Anti-Patterns

• Backlog as wishlist. Hundreds of stale items, no real ordering.
• Two backlogs. Tech debt has its own list nobody touches.
• Sprint Backlog handed down. Manager dictates tasks; team has no plan ownership.
• Soft DoD. "Done" means "demoable on local laptop" — leads to "done-done" jargon and untrustworthy velocity.

Cert Mapping

The next lesson dives into how to write the most important type of backlog item: the user story.