Do you have an overstuffed backlog the way Jenny did in Create More Success: How to Say No to “Everything” to Say Yes to What’s Necessary Now? I offered “now” advice in that newsletter. But what about the future? How can you prevent an overstuffed backlog, roadmap, or all those great ideas from interrupting your team from finishing its work?
You have several options:
- Separate the customer-facing problems from all the other ideas. Implement or fix those.
- Throw all the other ideas away because the good ideas come around again. (Or, create a parking lot.)
- Change your language. Instead of backlog or roadmap, start to call these ideas “options.”
Let me take each of these in order.
Implement or Fix Customer-Facing Problems
When customers report problems, how does your organization react? Does the team react and fix the problems right away? Or, do they feel they have to put the problems on a backlog somewhere?
Too often, teams tell me they need to “finish” the items in this sprint and then choose which problems to finish in the next sprint. That's because they have an already overstuffed backlog. (See Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers for why this happens.)
Remember this: If your customers want to use your product, make it easy for them to do so. Fix the outstanding problems before adding new features. Yes, even if those stories are part of the same feature set.
Why? Because product problems cause several other problems:
- The customers have to decide if the aggravation of using this product outweighs the defects.
- If the aggravation is too high, those customers will look for another vendor or solve their problem in another way.
Customers will not wait forever for you to fix problems in your product. And if you wait to fix long enough, they will resent you from changing your product with problems the customers understand to problems the customers now do not understand.
Yes, there is a Cost of Delay for fixing problems.
Assume you have fixed all the customer-reported or customer-facing problems. You still have a large backlog. What now?
Eliminate the Backlog in At Least Two Ways
Large backlogs create aging and a too-high cognitive load for managing that backlog. (I discussed this a little in Aging Fun with Drunk Agile (Video) and in How to Assess the Value of Old Data and Its Effect on Aging.)
We can file all those ideas into an electronic tool. Then we only have to deal with all those ideas when we open the tool. However, the larger the backlog gets, the worse we feel when we open the tool.
That's why aging is a part of the flow metrics feedback loop on the top of this post. The higher the aging, the more WIP we have in progress. (We all know what happens to things in that backlog or roadmap—someone wants to discuss them, often in the form of an estimate.) The higher the WIP, the higher the cycle time. That high cycle team leads to much lower throughput, which prompts people to put more on the backlog.
I have used these ideas to eliminate large and long backlogs:
- Delete everything and start new.
- Archive everything and start new. (Use a parking lot and don't look at it again.)
Starting new means: Limit the new ideas on the backlog to just the number of items the team can finish in the next few weeks. That allows you to do one-month rolling wave planning.
If you really think you need more candidate ideas, reduce the team's cycle time by splitting stories and asking “how little” can we do to get good information. That will allow the team to finish more items so you can generate more ideas and replan more often.
Are you worried about losing good ideas? Don't worry. They come around again.
Good Ideas Reappear
As a writer, I create options for my writing with my idea bank and fieldstones. I use those techniques because I never want to face the blank page. But I rarely use those prompts as is. I almost always change them in some way.
That's because that prompt was a good idea then. And, given how the world has changed, I have a better idea now.
The good idea reappears, in a slightly different form. And in a way that I suspect will resonate better with my readers.
So you don't have to worry about losing good ideas. They always come around again. Often, in an updated form that allows you to deliver something better and more useful to your customers.
That means you have options, not a backlog, for your products.
Create Options Where Possible
As soon as you put an idea on a backlog or a roadmap, you've set someone's expectations that the team is or will work on it. Even if the team knows that item is far off, they still expect to work on it. That increases WIP.
However, when you create options, you do not set that expectation. Even better, options require no estimation or work from anyone. You avoid creating a bloated product that customers do not want. The team can manage its WIP, which allows it to reduce cycle time, increase throughput, and learn faster. (Those feedback loops.)
When you use the word, “options,” (or possibilities, or considerations) you can create a great product that customers want. And if you don't overload the product with all kinds of extras, the customers will want to use it. You'll have more options for fixing problems faster.
That's how you can create better products with much less of a backlog.