The Backlog page is where all planning in Orvezo happens. It is where stories live before and during a sprint, where you prioritize and organize work, and where you decide what goes into each sprint. Understanding how it is structured saves a lot of confusion.
The three sections: Parking Lot, Backlog, and Sprint
The Backlog page is divided into three vertical columns: Parking Lot, Backlog, and Sprint. Each one has a specific purpose and stories can move between them freely by dragging and dropping.
Parking Lot is for work you want to keep but are not planning right now. Think of it as a holding area. Ideas that are not ready to be prioritized, work that is deferred until a future quarter, features that need more definition before they belong in active planning. Putting something in the Parking Lot is not deleting it. It is deliberately setting it aside so it does not compete with work that is actively being planned.
Backlog is your active planning list. Stories here are prioritized, groomed, and ready to be pulled into sprints. The order of the backlog reflects priority: stories higher up are higher priority. When you drag a story in the Backlog column, you are changing its priority relative to the others. This is the list you work from in sprint planning.
Sprint shows stories assigned to the sprint currently selected in the sprint dropdown at the top of the Sprint column. It is not a list of all sprints at once. It is a focused view of one sprint's worth of planned work. If the Sprint column is empty, check that you have a sprint selected in the dropdown.
Moving stories between sections
Stories move between Parking Lot, Backlog, and Sprint by drag and drop. You can grab any story card and drop it into a different column. Within a column, dragging a story up or down changes its order and therefore its priority.
Moving a story into the Sprint column assigns it to the sprint selected in the sprint dropdown. It does not automatically make it appear on the Board unless that sprint is the active sprint. Sprint planning and sprint execution are separate. A sprint can hold planned work before it becomes active.
Filters and saved views
At the top of the Backlog page you will see a set of filters: Tags, Assignee, Epic, Priority, and Blocked. These let you narrow what is shown in the backlog without changing the underlying data. Filtering by Epic is useful when you want to focus a planning session on one workstream. Filtering by Blocked surfaces any stories that cannot be started right now.
Saved views let you store a filter configuration and return to it without rebuilding the same filters each time. The view selector is in the top left of the Backlog page next to Manage views. If you have set filters that differ from the saved view you selected, the page shows you are in an unsaved state. Clicking Save view saves the current filter setup so you can return to it later.
Clear all removes the active filters on the page. If you were using a saved view, clearing filters may leave you in an unsaved state until you switch views or save again.
What makes a good backlog story
A story is ready for a sprint when it has a specific title, a description that explains the context and purpose, acceptance criteria that make it clear when the work is done, a priority, and an epic. A story without acceptance criteria is not a story yet. It is a note. Notes in the backlog create friction at planning time because someone has to stop and figure out what done looks like before the work can be estimated or assigned.
The story detail panel, which opens when you click on any story, has fields for all of this: title, description, acceptance criteria, assignee, status, estimate in points, priority, due date, blocked state, epic, tags, discussion comments, and file attachments. You can paste a screenshot directly into the attachments area with Ctrl+V when the story is focused.
Keeping the backlog healthy
A backlog that has not been maintained becomes a liability. Stories that are no longer relevant, vague titles with no description, work that was superseded by later decisions: all of it adds noise that slows down planning.
A few habits that help. Move anything you are not planning to work on in the next two or three sprints to the Parking Lot rather than leaving it in the Backlog column competing with active work. If a story has been sitting untouched for a long time and nobody is asking about it, consider whether it still belongs in the project at all. Keep the top ten to fifteen stories in the Backlog column in a state where any of them could realistically enter the next sprint, meaning they are well-described and ready to be picked up.
Sprint planning is faster and more productive when the backlog is clean. The meeting becomes about deciding what to commit to, not about figuring out what stories mean.