What are Sprints, Epics and Backlogs?

Think of a sprint as a watering can. You fill it with just enough water (work) to get visible progress done in a short, focused time window. That’s your sprint – targeted, time-boxed effort.

Now, where does this water come from?

It comes from a bucket nearby – your epic. This bucket is filled over time with ideas, feature requirements, tasks, and more. You won’t empty it in one go; instead, you draw from it gradually, sprint by sprint.

Inside that bucket is some water you haven’t used yet – this is your backlog. Some of it is ready to use (well-defined tasks), and some might be murky (needs clarification or grooming). You revisit and refine this backlog constantly.

What are Sprints, Epics and Backlogs in Rocketlane?

When managing large volumes of work across multiple projects, it helps to organize your initiatives into high-level goals and break them down into manageable pieces. Rocketlane's Sprints, Epics and Backlogs are designed to help you do just that. Sprints in Rocketlane allow you to organize and execute pieces of work within fixed, short periods. They are time-boxed cycles, typically lasting one or more weeks, used to group related tasks and focus your team's effort on delivering a specific increment of value. 

Epics in Rocketlane serve as large containers for major initiatives or high-level goals. They allow you to group related features, requirements, or substantial pieces of work that may take several weeks or even months to complete. By using Epics, teams can maintain a clear focus on the strategic objective, easily track the overall progress of a major deliverable, and communicate the status of large-scale efforts to stakeholders. They provide the necessary context for breaking down big ideas into smaller, more manageable tasks that can then be prioritized and executed.

Backlogs in Rocketlane functions as the single source of truth for all planned, potential, and unexecuted work. It is essentially a prioritized master list of tasks, user stories, and Epics that need to be completed. The Backlog allows teams to centralize all incoming requests, scope changes, and future features, giving them complete visibility into what needs to be done. By continuously grooming and prioritizing the Backlog, teams ensure that they are always working on the items that deliver the highest value next, making it the primary pool from which work is pulled into Sprints.