Building a Backlog Your Team Will Love

This resource first appeared in issue #114 on 19 Mar 2022 and has tags Strategy: Project Management

Building a Backlog Your Team Will Love - Blurbs By Amy

At my last job — and this was my fault — the backlog became an undifferentiated mass. We did keep higher priorities to the top, and lower priority items to the bottom. There was a lot there, though, some we were clearly never going to get to, and the tickets were of very different size… yeah, it wasn’t great.

Here Amy outlines her teams workflow, and it looks pretty good:

An inbox, called “Add New Here” to make it completely unambiguous that new tasks go there.
Have “Not planning to do” and “Future Nice to Haves” sections for record-keeping but to keep these from clogging up the works.
The workflow is that inbox items get groomed and then immediately triaged (duaged?) into “Groomed + Prioritized” for high-priority tasks, and “Groomed + Not Prioritized” for the lower-priority tasks, or one of the parking lots.
Then tasks get selected into Next Sprint tasks.

I like the unambiguous process here. You’re clearly doing something wrong if you add a ticket anywhere than “add new here”, for instance. Having two different parking lot sections seems a bit much, but it lets you move tasks into “Future nice to haves” without feeling like you’re consigning it to the dustbin. Over time clean-up can move things into Not Planning to Do, and adjust the priorities of groomed tasks.