How to Break Down Features: A Framework for Clean Backlog Tickets

A 2024 study of 600 software engineers found that projects with clear requirements before development were 97% more likely to succeed than those without. Feature breakdown is the difference between teams that ship predictably and teams that struggle with endless scope creep.

"Show me your backlog and I show you your future."

This article gives you a practical framework for breaking down features into four ticket types: spikes, tasks, tech stories, and bugs. Whether you're a Product Manager preparing for sprint planning or an engineering lead organizing technical work, this system will help you create clean, actionable backlog items that your team can actually deliver.

Why Breaking Down Features Matters

Having well-defined epics and user stories in place is a great way to prepare for upcoming projects. However, that's just the first step. The second step is to examine your goals and what you want to achieve with the whole team. You can break things down from there. This mainly happens during, before, or after a backlog grooming session.

"Two things usually cause project failures: missing transparency and not enough planning time."

I want to share how my current team and I decided to plan features and projects, which will give you insight into how we further structure our backlog as well as our implicit working agreements as a team.

There are a couple of reasons why we do this:

1. Good planning saves time later: We as a squad believe that good planning and preparation will prevent costly rework and wasted effort down the line. When you invest time upfront to understand what you're building, you avoid the expensive discovery that happens mid-sprint when someone realizes the requirements were unclear.
2. Clean backlogs create focus: A well-organized backlog helps us stay focused on a project and its priorities, without getting distracted by unclear or oversized tickets. When every ticket has a clear scope and purpose, developers can pick up work without needing to ask clarifying questions.
3. Visibility builds trust: Visibility and clarity help us be transparent about our progress and the next steps with stakeholders. When you can show a clean breakdown of remaining work, stakeholders understand exactly where the project stands without needing long status meetings.

Good planning and execution reduce working hours, stress, and increase both mood and work quality. Research shows that smaller stories are completed faster and that oversized stories drastically reduce the overall value a sprint can deliver. The math is clear: breaking work into smaller pieces isn't just good practice, it's measurably more effective.

The Product Manager's Responsibility

In all the companies I worked for, the Product and Engineering Teams were constantly confronted with changing requirements, tech debt, and deadlines. I regularly received questions and requests from stakeholders or customers like:

• When will it be finished?
• How will it look?
• Can we check it already?
• Can you change XYZ?
• Why does it take so long?

While exhausting and challenging on a typical day as a Product Manager, I always remind myself of the following:

I am responsible for answering these questions.

Not only for the stakeholders or the team but also for myself. Why? Because that's the only way to stay on top of what's happening. A couple of times, I caught myself getting annoyed or angry at these questions. Looking back, I realized the only reason for this reaction was that I didn't have the answers. That's why I always try to know the answer before someone asks.

I believe that good product people are always one step ahead. They anticipate questions, prepare answers, and use feature breakdown as a tool for creating that clarity. When someone asks "why does it take so long?" I can point to the breakdown and show exactly which pieces are complex, which have dependencies, and what the team is working through. That level of transparency transforms difficult conversations into productive discussions.

Adding Ticket Types to Your Backlog

The user story represents a collection of requirements that are detailed enough for Software Engineers to implement. Sometimes stories have bigger scopes, more complexity, or need research before they can be developed. In this case, we break them down and add additional issue types.

Here are the four ticket types we use beyond standard user stories:

Spikes: Research Before You Build

To me, a spike is one of the most important and underestimated tasks in any backlog. Many teams skip the research phase and jump straight into development, only to discover halfway through that their assumptions were wrong. Spikes prevent this waste by front-loading the discovery work.

"Story mapping should be persistent throughout development, not just upfront planning." — James & Tim, Avion.io

We use spikes to investigate deeper into a certain topic or to do research in a defined time box. The idea behind this is to figure out how to organize and break down work, identify risks, or evaluate and plan technical approaches. Spikes help teams avoid the trap of starting development without understanding the problem space.

Instead of INVEST (the framework for user stories), we use the SMART framework for spikes and tasks:

• Specific: Clearly define what you're investigating. "Research authentication options" is too vague. "Compare OAuth2 providers for our SSO implementation" is specific.
• Measurable: Define success criteria and expected outputs. What artifact will the spike produce? A decision document? A proof of concept? Architecture diagrams?
• Achievable: Scope it to what one or two people can accomplish. If the spike requires the whole team, it's probably too big and should be broken down further.
• Relevant: Connect it to a real business or technical need. Every spike should unblock a specific user story or technical decision.
• Time-boxed: Set a maximum duration. We aim for 3 days max. If you can't answer the question in 3 days, you need to narrow the scope.

You can write a spike similar to a user story. Instead of acceptance criteria, we define the expected outcomes.

Spike Example: Purchase History Service

Let's imagine we want to sell T-shirts online with our own online store. We've built our own online shop and are close to launching it. One missing piece in the puzzle is a purchase history that shows customers the products they've bought, including payment information, billing, and shipping address.

Since our team hasn't done anything like this before, we need to come up with a technical concept (imagine the UI exists already). When we set the scope of a spike, we focus on the number of developers involved and the days they'll spend on the topic. We aim for max 3 days. In our case, the engineers prefer to write the tasks because they know what the outcome should be best.

Intro:

In order to provide a purchase history to our customers, we need to build a service that collects data from other services like:

• sales_service
• product_service
• invoicing_service
• shipping_service

Expected outcomes:

• Check the design and understand the requirements for all information that needs to be shown
• Read the documentation of the listed services
• Reach out to the code owners of other squads to understand dependencies
• Provide a proof of concept for service architecture
• Everything documented in Confluence and shared with the squad and stakeholders

Timebox: 1 developer, 2 days

Tasks: Getting the Little Things Done

A task's scope is smaller than that of a story. At the same time, tasks don't necessarily need to deliver any end-to-end customer value. We define tasks as work that can be done within 1-2 days.

Example: Updating database services from Java 10 to Java 11.0.2

Tasks can be estimated or time-boxed depending on how your team prefers to deal with them. We write tasks in the same way as user stories, with a clear intro, acceptance criteria, and any relevant notes or open questions.

The key difference between a task and a user story is the scope and the customer value. Tasks are typically technical work that enables user stories or maintains system health. They're essential for keeping your codebase clean and your infrastructure running smoothly.

Common examples of tasks include:

• Upgrading dependencies to newer versions
• Setting up monitoring dashboards
• Configuring CI/CD pipelines
• Writing documentation for existing features
• Refactoring code without changing behavior

Tech Stories: Enabling Your Engineers

We apply tech stories for two use cases:

1. Enabling user stories: When the scope is bigger and requires a technical foundation before the user-facing feature can be built.
2. System maintenance: For bigger technical tasks that don't necessarily deliver customer value but are important to keep the system running.

The difference between a tech story and a task is primarily scope. Tasks are 1-2 days of work. Tech stories are larger efforts that might take a sprint or more, involving multiple engineers and coordination across teams.

Example scenario:

Initial user story: Enable our customers to access a purchase history on their user profile

In this case, the new page would require a backend service that provides this kind of information. Building the new backend service is a very big task with cross-team dependencies. Therefore, it makes sense to break it down into a tech story.

Intro: Build the backend service to aggregate purchase data from multiple microservices.

Acceptance Criteria:

• The new service has been written in Java
• All tests pass after the update with no regressions
• Everything runs on the new version
• API documentation is complete

If you're looking for a comprehensive guide to better manage your backlog, check out this read on backlog management.

Bugs: Internal and External

Let's start with a quote from one of the best Engineers I worked with:

"We try to implement it perfectly and introduce bugs later, but this does not work always." — Mouad Benchchaoui

Sometimes software contains smaller or bigger errors called bugs. It's essential to track and prioritize them based on their impact, costs, urgency, and other factors. We deal with bugs in two separate categories:

1. Internal bugs: Found by ourselves during development or testing
2. External bugs: Reported by customers, partners, or other parties

We use the ticket type "Bug" for internal bugs and "Production Support" for external bugs. The reason we use two different types of tickets is to better separate and filter them in the backlogs. Another benefit is that you can better track and report on things we've found versus what our customers found. This helps us improve our processes in the event we find bugs after launching, which should have happened before.

What to Include in Bug Tickets

The most important information we track in our bug tickets:

Title: As for all other tickets, we try to define titles with as much detail as possible. On top of that, we add the environment which can be, for example, "Production" (live system) or "Staging" (testing environment).

Bad example: Login fails
Better example: [Production]: Users can't log in on our web dashboard

Application type and affected version: In order to help Quality Assurers or Engineers to investigate issues fast, it's important to provide as much information as possible.

Application: Web dashboard www.domainname.com and iOS app
Affected version: Google Chrome 77.0.3865.90, iOS 13.1.1 (Note: older versions are affected as well)

Steps to reproduce: (if possible) To better understand the problem and debug it, we add the individual steps to reproduce the failed login:

1. Visit www.domainname.com/login
2. Insert a valid username and password
3. Press the login button
4. Error message modal appears: "Can't log in 500 fatal error." See added screenshot

Expected outcomes: In the case of the login, the expected outcome would've been a successful login and redirection to www.domainname.com

If Customer Support is trained to gather this information from a conversation, we gain even more insights. Sometimes customers expect different outcomes that help to improve the product and user experience.

Choosing the Right Ticket Type

With four different ticket types available, how do you know which one to use? Here's a quick decision guide:

• Use a Spike when you don't know how to solve the problem yet. If the team is guessing about technical approach or needs to research options, start with a spike. The investment of 1-3 days upfront often saves weeks of rework later.
• Use a Task for small technical work (1-2 days) that doesn't directly deliver customer value but needs to get done. Think maintenance, upgrades, and configuration work that keeps the system healthy.
• Use a Tech Story for larger technical work that enables user stories or maintains system health. This is your go-to for foundational infrastructure work that spans multiple days or involves cross-team coordination.
• Use a Bug when something isn't working as intended. Always capture where the bug was found (internal vs external) to improve your quality processes over time. The distinction helps you understand whether your testing caught the issue or your customers did.

The most common mistake I see is teams treating everything as a user story. This leads to bloated stories with mixed concerns—part research, part implementation, part infrastructure. By separating these into distinct ticket types, each piece of work becomes clearer and easier to estimate.

Another common mistake is skipping spikes entirely. Teams often feel pressure to "just start coding" without proper investigation. This almost always leads to false starts, wrong architectural decisions, and wasted effort. A 2-day spike that prevents a 2-week rewrite is always worth the investment.

Linking Tickets in Your Backlog

After breaking down features and projects into smaller and more granular pieces, there's one final and important task for us to do: linking.

To keep our backlog clean, we link tickets in two ways:

1. Feature linking: All tickets that are related to the project will be linked to the epic or feature
2. Dependency linking: Tickets that have a dependency on each other, like tech stories and user stories

The biggest mistake most Product Managers and teams make is linking tickets that are out of scope. Whenever you've decided to build a feature and define its scope, you should link everything to it. However, a lot of teams link future requests, stories, or work that pops up after launch to the original epic. This leads to the problem of the epic's scope blowing up and you can't keep track of the progress because it gets bigger and bigger.

I recommend creating follow-up epics. You can use them to link to all tickets which are beyond the MVP or MMF. This only works if your feature has a clear scope from the beginning.

One More Backlog Thing: Clean Tickets

A clear and clean breakdown will help you get started from day one in a structured way. I still remind myself every day about the importance of clean tickets. That means making sure that every single ticket has a clear title, a clear description, and most importantly: clear acceptance criteria or goals and outcomes.

"Definition of Ready and Done aren't about frameworks—they're sanity checks."

I frequently see teams whose backlogs or tickets in active development don't have any content besides a title. This leads to the following problematic questions:

• What needs to be accepted by the Product Manager or Designer?
• What to look at when code review happens?
• How does someone know what to test?
• What is the scope and when is it done?

That's why having a "definition of ready" and a "definition of done" is so important for teams. You can read more about that here: Definition of done and ready

I'd love to hear how you break down your features. Tell me on LinkedIn.