Metadata
- Author: lucasfcosta.com
- Full Title:: Why Backlogs Are Harmful, Why They Never Shrink, and What to Do Instead
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Product Engineer
- URL:: https://lucasfcosta.com/2023/02/07/backlogs-are-useless.html
- Finished date:: 2023-02-11
Highlights
Whenever anyone asks a product manager for a shiny new feature, for example, it’s much easier to say “you’ll add it to the backlog,” than to spend an hour explaining why the suggestion is irrelevant. (View Highlight)
Sometimes, even the requestors themselves know the task won’t be done, but once they’ve gotten it into “the backlog,” all of a sudden, it’s someone else’s responsibility. (View Highlight)
In reality, a product manager’s job is not to create as many tickets as possible but to delete as many as they can and avoid unnecessary work at all costs. (View Highlight)
Another reason backlogs create an insurmountable amount of overhead is that they’re built at the wrong level of abstraction. It’s much easier to run a business when you’re looking at a high-level roadmap than when you’re scrambling amongst a thousand tickets in JIRA (ugh). (View Highlight)