From idea to backlog in 15 minutes

You have an idea and an empty board. By the end of this guide you’ll have epics, scoped tasks, dependencies, and acceptance criteria, without writing a ticket by hand. We’ll use a real example: adding usage-based billing alerts to a SaaS app.

What you need

A Masaro account (quickstart) and ten honest minutes. Voice optional.

1. Dump the idea, imperfections included

Open Brainstorm and give it what you actually have:

“I want to alert users before they blow through their plan limits. Email probably? Maybe in-app too. I don’t know what thresholds make sense. 80%? And billing is on Stripe but usage lives in our own tables.”

Notice what that is: half decisions, half open questions. That’s the right input. Don’t pre-clean it.

2. Answer the sharp questions

Masaro comes back with the questions that turn a notion into scope:

  • “Alert on which limits: API calls, seats, storage, all of them?”
  • “When a user crosses a threshold mid-billing-cycle, alert once or on every threshold?”
  • “Is ‘blow through’ a hard cap (block) or soft (notify and allow)?”
  • “Email exists in your stack already, or is provider setup part of this work?”

Answer in plain language. “Just API calls for v1. Alert once per threshold per cycle. Soft cap. We have Resend set up.” Each answer is quietly becoming a scope boundary or a criterion.

3. Review the draft plan

Masaro proposes something like:

  • Epic: Usage alert foundations. Usage-threshold computation (medium), threshold-crossing detection with once-per-cycle dedup (medium, blocked by computation).
  • Epic: Alert delivery. Email alert with plan/usage details (small, blocked by detection), in-app banner (small, marked v2 per your answer).

With criteria where they matter, e.g. on detection: “When a customer’s API usage crosses 80% of plan quota, exactly one alert event is recorded for that threshold this billing cycle; crossing it again after a reset triggers a new one.”

That criterion came out of your answers. You said “once per threshold per cycle”; it became testable.

4. Edit like an editor, not an author

Disagree with a split? Merge it. Estimate feels off? Change it. Criterion too soft? Tighten it. This pass typically takes two minutes because you’re reacting to a concrete plan rather than staring at a blank ticket form. Accept, and the plan lands on your board.

5. Sanity-check the graph

On the board: dependencies mean an agent asking for work gets computation first, not email delivery against numbers that don’t exist yet. Sequencing lives in the structure now.

Done, and next

You have an executable backlog: move the first task to Ready and hand it to Claude Code, or work it yourself. Either way, done is already defined.