In this article, Christophe Le Coent discusses how you can express a Scrum product backlog to provide enough planning information to management but still following the Agile principle that “welcome changes over following a plan”.
The article presents different way to visualize the product backlog with their benefits and disadvantages. Usually, you represent your product backlog in a flat way as for instance a list in a spreadsheet. You can also use a mindmap diagram. Christophe Le Coent presents also user story mapping. In this representation, you use big features as column and classify user stories below according to their priorities. Finally, he presents rolling-release look-ahead mapping. His conclusion is that “As teams become more and more mature and more effective at using Scrum, product backlogs should provide more and more visual, accurate information.”