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Freshworks · Freshrelease · 3 months

Backlog & Sprints: designing the planning core of Freshrelease

A three-pane epics / backlog / sprints workspace that let teams prioritize thousands of items and run sprint planning without leaving one screen.

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Role
Lead sole designer
Platform
Web
Team
PM, Eng, QA
Impact
700 customers in 3 months
Freshrelease final three-pane Epics, Backlog, and Sprints view
Shipped: the three-pane Epics · Backlog · Sprints workspace
Product context

Freshrelease · all-in-one agile project management

Freshrelease is Freshworks' agile project management product — issue and bug tracking, roadmapping, backlog management, sprint planning, Kanban boards, test-case management, and release management in one place. The mission wasn't just to be another issue tracker, but to help teams ship quality software faster by making planning and status updates genuinely easy to use.

Goals

Help teams identify, break down, and prioritize work — fast

Business
Get Freshrelease to product-market fit.
Product
A product that helps teams ship software faster, not just track it.
Feature — Backlog & Sprints
Let teams list top to-do items, break them into tasks, and prioritize with confidence.
Research

From a flat list to a real sprint-planning workflow

The starting point was a basic work-item list inherited from Freshdesk — usable for listing, but with no way to prioritize, which pushed teams toward Jira instead. Early versions split backlog and sprint planning across two separate pages, on the assumption that PMs groomed the backlog ahead of time and teams prioritized separately during the sprint.

Watching real sprint-planning sessions changed that assumption: prioritization was happening live, with PMs and the team in the room together, and people were constantly switching back and forth between the backlog and sprints pages. That observation — not a stakeholder request — was what justified merging both into a single view.

Freshdesk's flat unresolved-tickets list, the inherited starting point
Before: a flat ticket list with no way to prioritize
Early version with backlog and sprints split across two pages
Before: backlog and sprints as two separate pages
Design decisions

A three-pane view: Epics, Backlog, Sprints

The proposed solution was a single page with epics, backlog, and sprints side by side, epic context available on demand, and search, sort, and filters throughout — so nobody had to leave the page to plan a sprint.

Visual hierarchy
Epics → Backlog → Sprints mirrors how information actually flows, from big bets down to reorderable, sprint-ready items.
Card view over table
Switched from a dense table to cards to keep the same information scannable while supporting drag-and-drop reordering.
Infinite list over pagination
Kept reordering possible across a huge backlog and let teams scan what's there without clicking through pages.
Epic tags, not epic drop targets
Dropping items onto epics created ranking ambiguity, so epic context is shown as a tag on every item instead — context without a broken interaction.
Dropping items onto epics produced duplicated, garbled epic assignments
Evidence: epic drop targets produced ambiguous, duplicated assignments — the reason for tags instead
Card-based backlog supporting drag-and-drop reordering
Card view in use: reordering a live backlog by drag
Challenges

Fitting everything on one page — without breaking it

Design
Fitting epics, backlog, and sprints into one coherent view with clear hierarchy — while keeping search, filters, and reordering intuitive across a list that could run into the thousands.
Engineering
Smooth drag-and-drop and lazy loading across thousands of backlog items without the page slowing down or crashing.
Outcome

700 customers in 3 months

700
customers in 3 months
$20K
ARR generated
↑
ranking frequency post-launch

Customers validated the interface directly in sessions, sprint planning with epic context became noticeably easier, and the frequency of backlog ranking rose measurably once the UX friction was removed — a proxy for teams actually trusting the prioritization workflow.

Freshrelease, #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt
Freshrelease landed #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt — external validation that the redesigned planning workflow resonated beyond existing customers.
Takeaways

The earliest project where I learned to design from behavior, not assumptions.

My initial assumptions about how PMs and teams would use the backlog were reasonable — and wrong. Watching one live sprint-planning session was worth more than the assumptions I'd started with, and it's the habit I've carried into every project since: watch the real workflow before committing to the information architecture.

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