User Stories — Part 3: Building the Backlog

maang.io AI-Native Builder Series

📦 Artifacts for this topic — build against these, and check your own with them:
reference backlog → artifacts/reference/streakup-backlog.md (the filled-in StreakUp backlog) ·
prompts → artifacts/prompts/01-draft-stories-and-criteria · 02-critique-the-backlog ·
check your work → artifacts/verify.md.
Build yours first, then compare — the reference is a mentor's version to verify
against, not an answer key to paste.

What is this?

Think about how you'd actually cook a big meal for that dinner party. You don't have a pile of unordered index cards floating in chaos. You have a prep list, in order: brine the chicken first (it takes hours), then chop the vegetables, then make the sauce, and plate the dessert last. The order isn't random — it's driven by what depends on what, and what matters most. A good chef's prep list is the single document that turns "cook a whole dinner" from terrifying into a series of obvious next steps.

A backlog is that ordered prep list for your app. In Parts 1 and 2 you wrote a pile of user stories with acceptance criteria. A pile isn't a plan — you don't know what to do first. The backlog is the same stories, put in order: most important and foundational at the top, nice-to-haves further down. It's the to-do list you and your AI cook will work through, top to bottom, one story at a time, all through 201.

The one-line idea: a backlog is your user stories arranged into one prioritized, top-to-bottom to-do list — so "build the app" becomes "build the next story."

The chef's ordered prep list — most important and most depended-on first — is the spirit of this chapter. Let's build StreakUp's.