Why Your Product Backlog Is a Graveyard with a Search Bar
Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
A product backlog that treats a multi-quarter platform bet and a CSS tweak as peer-level items is structurally broken. This article explains the flat backlog trap, where volume-based prioritization, recency bias, and false equivalence in scoring lead to a roadmap that optimizes for noise. It introduces the flight levels model to separate strategic, coordination, and operational decisions, and advocates for an initiative layer between objectives and ideas. It also critiques delivery tools like Jira for pushing teams toward output thinking, and recommends maintaining separate product and delivery backlogs.
Every sprint planning session started with the same ritual: scroll through the list, argue about what matters, pick things based on whoever made the strongest case that week, and move on feeling slightly defeated.
- bluGill
I'm making a point to be careful what I allow into my backlog. If realistically we're not going to do it, it doesn't belong in the backlog. There are a lot of things I want to do that are not in the backlog because I know realistically they're just not worth it. Even with AI where you are not using your monthly token allowance, there are still a lot of things not worth doing.
Just this week I was thinking about an idea that would improve builds, let's do that refactoring. However, as I started looking into the amount of work I would require to get it done, I realized that, yes, it would be an improvement to our builds, but the cost of getting the work done is greater than the improvement is worth, and so I'm not going to go forward with it. It's too bad there are a number of annoyances that I'm going to be living with because it's not worth fixing. But that is the reality of life. I need to do things that will ultimately satisfy our customers that keep coming back and paying us more money.
- natbennett
Just delete stuff you’re not going to do.
- jonstewart
A strong whiff of AI writing.