How to: clean up a backlog.
Looking to do some spring cleaning on that backlog? We got your back.
Over the years, I’ve joined several teams across multiple companies and products. Each team had some semblance of a backlog with all types of interesting features and ideas ready to be built.
Anything from recent ideas to things that landed on the backlog years before that got buried.
Although reading the old work items helped me understand some of the pain points my new company has experienced, I often found that the work items provided few insights and/or lacked a lot of information about the business needles they would move.
A periodic review helps us eliminate clutter and focus on tasks that truly benefit our current objectives.
Let’s dig into our backlog and discuss how to make it as effective and streamlined as possible.
Relevance Check
As the product direction and priorities evolve, our backlog should reflect these changes.
Regularly clearing out tasks that no longer serve our goals prevents wasted effort and keeps the team aligned.
Here are some quick ideas on where to start:
Identify Old Tasks: Highlight work pending for an extended period without updates.
Evaluate Relevance: Assess whether these long-standing works align with your product/company’s strategic goals.
Team Feedback: Connect with your team and encourage everyone to give their opinions on the necessity of these work items.
Discuss and Decide: Discuss and agree on whether to proceed with or remove these work items.
Action Steps: Formally remove tasks that are no longer relevant from the backlog. Note! Remember to leave a note on the actual work item explaining WHY you removed it in case someone looks for that work.
Refining Work
With a pared-down list, the remaining work must be well-defined and directly contribute to our short- and/or long-term goals.
Clear and actionable work can ensure efficient use of available team member time and improve team morale by reducing ambiguity and frustration:
Review Goals: Confirm that the goals associated with each work item are specific and measurable.
Seek Clarity: Revise any work that has outdated or unclear descriptions.
Gather Input: Mark work items that require additional insights or expertise from specific team members.
Collaborate: Organize brief meetings or discussion sessions to refine these work items collaboratively.
Finalize Details: Update the work based on received feedback to ensure they are clear and relevant.
Prioritizing Work
After refining our backlog, the next crucial step is prioritizing them effectively.
This helps us allocate our resources strategically, ensuring that we focus on the most impactful tasks first, which can lead to quicker and more significant results
You can pick whatever your favorite prioritization tool/method is, but if you want a quick and dirty value vs. effort approach, here you go:
Reassess Effort: Re-evaluate how much effort each change will realistically require.
Estimate Value: Determine the potential impact of each work item compared to its effort.
Rank Tasks: Sort each work item by priority, considering their importance and urgency.
Plan Sprints: Use the refined priorities to plan upcoming sprints or project phases.
Update Roadmap: Adjust your roadmap to reflect these new priorities, keeping our long-term strategy in focus.
When you start removing some of these work items, might you ruffle the feathers of some stakeholders who asked for a fringe feature four years ago that was never built?
Sure.
However, keeping our backlog clear and relevant ensures that we always work on the most impactful work, enhances the team’s productivity, and will continue to help move the product toward your goals.
This is a win-win in my book.