Every project has work that exists somewhere between an idea and a commitment. It is real enough to write down, but not ready to go into the backlog. It might need more thought, more context, a dependency to resolve first, or simply a different quarter. Orvezo gives this work a specific home: the Parking Lot.
Understanding the difference between the Parking Lot, the Backlog, and the Sprint is one of the most important things you can do to keep your project organized. When these three sections are used correctly, the backlog stays clean, sprints stay focused, and nothing important gets lost.
The three sections of the backlog page
When you open the Backlog tab inside a project, you see three columns side by side: Parking Lot, Backlog, and Sprint. Each one represents a different stage of readiness.
The Sprint column shows whichever sprint is currently active. If there is no active sprint, you can use the dropdown at the top of that column to select any sprint you want to inspect or populate. This means you can plan a future sprint directly from the backlog page, dragging stories into it before it starts.
The Backlog is the prioritized queue of work that is ready to be picked up. Stories here are well-defined, have a clear owner or at least a clear assignee candidate, and are prioritized relative to each other. When sprint planning comes around, this is where you pull from.
The Parking Lot is the third column, and it is the one most teams either ignore or misuse. It is not a backlog overflow. It is not a place to put things you do not want to decide about. It is a deliberate holding area for work that is real but not yet ready for the backlog.
What belongs in the Parking Lot
The Parking Lot is the right place for a story when one or more of the following is true.
The idea is real but not fully defined. You know you need to build something, but you have not written the acceptance criteria yet, you do not know who will own it, or the scope is still unclear. Putting an underspecified story directly in the backlog pollutes the planning process. It will sit there confusing people during sprint planning because nobody is sure what done actually means. The Parking Lot is where it lives until it has been properly fleshed out.
The work is blocked by something external. If a story cannot move forward until another team delivers something, a vendor comes back, or a decision gets made, it does not belong in the backlog competing for attention during planning. Park it, note the blocker in the description, and pull it into the backlog when the dependency resolves.
It is deliberately scheduled for later. Some work is known and real, but it belongs to a future quarter or a future phase of the product. Rather than creating it as a backlog item and letting it drift down the priority list, park it explicitly. This signals to the team that the work is intentionally deferred, not forgotten.
It is an idea worth capturing but not yet evaluated. Sometimes a story comes from a conversation, a customer request, or a team member's intuition. It is worth writing down so it does not get lost, but it has not been evaluated for priority, effort, or strategic fit. The Parking Lot is the right place for it while that evaluation happens.
What does not belong in the Parking Lot
The Parking Lot fails when it becomes a place to avoid decisions. If you find yourself parking stories because you do not want to prioritize them, or because it is easier than saying no, the Parking Lot will slowly fill up with noise that makes the whole system harder to use.
Stories that are ready to be worked on belong in the Backlog, not the Parking Lot. If a story has a clear title, clear acceptance criteria, a known owner, and a reason to exist in the current phase of the product, move it to the backlog and prioritize it there.
Stories that will never get done should be closed or deleted, not parked. If you created a story six months ago and it has sat in the Parking Lot untouched, ask honestly whether it still matters. If the answer is no, delete it. The Parking Lot should only contain work you actually intend to revisit.
Moving stories between sections
Stories move between the Parking Lot, Backlog, and Sprint by dragging and dropping. You can grab any story card and drop it into another column. Orvezo updates the story's placement immediately.
You can also change a story's placement from inside the story itself. When you open a story, the placement field lets you move it to any section without going back to the backlog page. This is useful when you are reviewing a story in detail and decide it is ready to graduate to the backlog or be pulled into a sprint.
When you create a new story using the Add User Story button on the backlog page, it defaults to whichever column you clicked the button in. So clicking Add User Story in the Parking Lot column creates a story in the Parking Lot. You can change this from the story creation form before saving.
Filtering the Parking Lot
The backlog page has filters that apply across all three columns: Tags, Assignee, Epic, Priority, Blocked, and Due state. These filters are useful when you are reviewing the Parking Lot during planning. You can filter by epic to see which parked stories belong to a particular workstream, or filter by blocked to find stories that are waiting on a dependency that might now be resolved.
You can also save views. If you have a filter configuration you return to regularly, for example always filtering by your epic and showing only high-priority items across all sections, you can save that as a named view and switch back to it with one click using the Manage Views button.
Keeping the Parking Lot healthy
The Parking Lot is only useful if it gets reviewed regularly. A good habit is to spend five to ten minutes reviewing the Parking Lot at the start of each sprint planning session. The question to ask for each story is simple: is this ready to move to the backlog, should it stay parked, or should it be deleted?
Stories that have been parked for more than two sprints without moving should be explicitly reviewed. Either they are truly deferred for a reason, in which case it is worth adding a note to the description explaining why, or they have been forgotten, in which case they should be deleted.
A clean Parking Lot makes sprint planning faster. When the team sits down to plan, they can look at the Backlog and Sprint columns knowing that everything in those columns is real, prioritized, and ready. The Parking Lot is out of the way but not forgotten.
The Parking Lot as a communication tool
One underrated use of the Parking Lot is as a place to capture requests that come in from outside the team during an active sprint. When a stakeholder asks for something mid-sprint, the right answer is not to pull it into the current sprint and disrupt the plan. The right answer is to park it, acknowledge that it has been captured, and evaluate it during the next planning session.
This gives you a structured way to say yes to capturing requests without saying yes to scope creep. The request is not lost. It is not being ignored. It is parked and will be evaluated on its merits when the timing is right.
Used this way, the Parking Lot becomes a lightweight intake system for your team. Anything that comes in during the sprint goes to the Parking Lot first. Nothing goes directly into the sprint without a planning conversation. This one habit alone can dramatically reduce mid-sprint disruption.