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Delete your backlog!

Writer's picture: Stephen AngoodStephen Angood

Delete your backlog

How do you prioritise when everything is a priority?


Now the poet John Lydgate once said a very prophetic line;

You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time

Although he lived over 500 years ago this quote is very apt when we think about prioritising our work and creating our product backlog.


But do you even need a product backlog? What would happen if you deleted it? Well, talk about it.


It often feels like we have too much work to do, with tight deadlines and not enough time or people to get it all done. This can lead to stress, fatigue and a lack of well-being.


The thing to realise is that we're always going to have a constant stream of high priority work and we need to try and accept this and come to terms with it.


And actually, when you think about it, this is a very good thing, we should embrace it.


We want to be involved in an environment that is providing us with work that is both important and valuable. Think of the alternative, very little work with no priority on getting it done and no real value in what is being delivered.


Would that result in less stress or more? Particularly in 2024 and the economic climate we're all living in.


The point is that we need to get comfortable with this fact and do something about it, learn to prioritise.


This will reduce our anxiety and allow us to work on the right thing at the right time.


If John Lydgate was coining phrases in our agile world today he may well have said;

You need to please the right people, customers, at the right time, all of the time

We do this by using a prioritisation technique. At its basic level it's just a list of work ordered by rank of importance.


How we decide on this ranking is by communicating and collaborating with our team, stakeholders and Leadership to gain the insight needed. We need to answer questions such as ‘what business value does this have?’, ‘how quickly must it be delivered?’, ‘does it reduce risk or provide opportunity?’, ‘how big and complex is it to deliver?’ among many others.


The answer to these questions might sometimes be I don't know and that's okay, we're not in this alone.


So we need to reach out to the people who can help. Now sometimes prioritisation might yield surprising results, so sense check them.


If you know that a piece of work is clearly the top priority but it comes last when you use a prioritisation technique due to its size and complexity then break the work down and rerun.


Prioritisation will help you to work on the right thing at the right time and it reduces stress, fatigue and anxiety.


Now something that stops people from truly prioritising work is that it often leads to an ever expanding backlog, so you end up with a list of 100, 200 things which you'll never end up doing. Having those difficult conversations with stakeholders, when you have to tell them that you aren't going to work on their project as you've got higher priority items.


You end up just responding to whoever shouts the loudest or has the most seniority.


Now here is a radical thought, do you even need a backlog?


Remember the movie ‘Honey I Shrunk The Kids’ well think about shrinking your backlog or even getting rid of it completely.


I mean what good are they anyway if you're just going to have a list of 500 items on it most of which you will never deliver. What is the point in that?


Think about it, does your product backlog reduce to zero in 3 to 6 months or does it in fact actually grow.


I think most of us would say that the backlog is actually bigger after 6 months not smaller and certainly not at zero - because we have trouble saying no to our stakeholders.


This causes issues because we know when we add new features all the time the chance of getting them done is very low, particularly if they're still in the backlog after 6 months.


What impression does a stakeholder get when we never deliver? Not a good one and we start to get a bad reputation for non-delivery and we lose trust.


So why not delete your backlog completely! Think about it what would happen? You'd survive because you would remember your top priority work.


Why not be goal orientated instead. Take a tip from Jeff Bezos when he was at Amazon and used day one thinking.


Basically you imagine you're a startup and focus on the most important things your customers need. Think about why you exist, your mission and strategy and focus on that. Repeat this process every quarter and delete your backlog again. Repeat your startup day one thinking.


You can do this with a product goal or you could use OKRs. But if you use OKRs don't fall into the trap of creating your OKRs from your previous product backlog, that is a pointless exercise.


So understand the vision of the product or service you're trying to deliver and work out a list of goals you need to achieve in order to realise the vision and then just prioritise those goals.


Time box the whole thing to run every 3 months, then rinse and repeat.


Don't worry about the stories needed for each Sprint. The team are perfectly capable of working out all the tasks needed in order to achieve a goal if it's well explained and understood.


Prioritisation is also the first step to help you limit your work in progress and reduce your contact switching.


All that time you spend managing the backlog bouncing from one piece of work to the next, ask yourself honestly what does it actually achieve?


So stop starting and start finishing as David J Anderson said all the way back in 2004. Understand the vision and set the goals, there's no need to make this more difficult than it has to be.

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