The backlog is where Pilea’s analysis becomes your team’s work queue. Every item carries its evidence with it - mention count, customer count, deal size (revenue), themes, tags, assignee, commenters, and the date it was last mentioned - so you never have to ask “why is this here?”

Three views, one backlog

Switch between Table, List, and Kanban views. They show the same items, just organized differently. On the kanban board, the columns are the triage statuses - so moving a card is triaging it.

The toolbar is compact, and in the table and list views you can change an item’s status and type inline without opening it. Column widths are remembered separately for each view.

Triage statuses

Every backlog item has one status:

Status	What it means
📬 New	Just arrived - not yet triaged
💾 Saved	Reviewed and kept for later
🧑‍💻 Ready for Dev	Specced and ready to pick up
🚶 In Progress	Someone’s working on it
🧪 Ready for Test	Built, awaiting verification
✅ Completed	Shipped and done
🚫 Won’t Do	Deliberately declined
📦 Archived	Out of the active backlog
💤 Snoozed	Parked - revisit later

Item types and sizes

Item types come from your workspace’s analysis framework. With the Backlog Management framework, for example, items are classified as 🚀 Feature, ✨ Improvement, 🐛 Bug, or 🔧 Technical Debt. If you use a custom framework, the types are the categories you defined.

Each item also gets a size from XS to XL. Sizes aren’t just labels - they feed the effort divisor in priority scoring, so small high-signal items float above large ones.

Finding what you need

Use search plus filters for Type, Status, Assignee, Tag, Theme, and Date. A Companies row holds the customer-side filters: specific companies, Customer tags, and any custom customer fields you’ve defined (segment, region, plan, and so on), so “what are enterprise accounts in the Nordics asking for?” is one filter away. Completed and archived items are tucked away by default - flip the Show completed/archived switch to bring them back.

The Date filter has two modes. Mentioned shows items that received feedback in the window, and the mention and customer counts are windowed to match, so “what came in this month” is a real view. Created filters by when the item itself was created.

Sort options include Priority Score, Last Mentioned, Last Created, Mentions, Customers, and Deal Size; the default sort is Last Mentioned, so fresh customer signal surfaces first.

Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) anywhere in the app to open the command palette. It searches backlog items, companies, themes, tags, insights, surveys, documents and imports at once, jumps to any page, or starts a chat with Pilea.

If you want fresh scores right now instead of waiting for the next automatic run, click Recalculate scores.

Inside an item

Opening an item shows a Mentions over time chart at the top, so you can see whether a request is growing or fading before you read a word, with the priority breakdown alongside. Use the Previous and Next arrows in the corner (or the arrow keys) to move through items in the order of the list you came from.

The Details tab holds the description, status, type, size, assignee, tags and themes. You can create a new tag or theme right from the picker without leaving the item. The Mentions tab lists the evidence: every mention shows the verbatim excerpt that made Pilea link it to this item, so you can check a link without opening the source.

Every item has its own URL. Click the Copy link icon to grab it, paste it into Slack or Linear, and it opens the item directly. Links in the form /backlog/<id> open the item page; links to the backlog with ?item=<id> open it as a sheet over the list.

Working in bulk

Multi-select items to act on many at once: set a status, add or remove tags and themes, or delete. Spotted duplicates? Select them and use Merge to combine them into a single item - their evidence comes along for the ride.

Pilea can propose merges too. Ask it in chat to tidy the backlog and it surfaces a confirmation card; the merge only happens once you confirm it in the same dialog you’d use on the backlog page.

💡 Tip: Merging duplicates isn’t just tidying. Consolidated items concentrate their mentions and customers in one place, which gives you a truer picture of demand.

Exporting to your issue tracker

When an item is ready to build, send it where your engineers live:

Open the item and go to its Details tab.
Under the Export to Issue Tracker section, you’ll see a button for each tracker you’ve connected.
Click it (for example Export to Linear), then pick the project or repo.

Already-exported items show a link, so you can jump straight to the issue - and you won’t accidentally export the same item twice.

ℹ️ Note: Exporting doesn’t remove the item from Pilea. It stays in your backlog with all its customer evidence intact.

Next: How the Pilea priority score works

Managing your backlog