Product Backlog as a Suggestion Box

Hi, I'm Hans. I write a blog about Scrum, Agile and anything that might relate to it or could be interesting to people interfacing with the themes. If you aren't following me, then here is what you might have missed this month:

• Three Ways How Scrum Unravels Complexity
• Overproduction in Software Development
• The Cult of Done Manifesto
• Is Continuous Integration & Deployment Non-Optional?

This one is for product owners, especially the kind that sits on top of a bloated product backlog and has a product suffering scope creep. Your product has many users and stakeholders and all of them come up with ideas for the product. Why wouldn’t you wanna add them to the product backlog? They all sound great!

Look at that big chonker of a product backlog you’re managing. Do you see all the problems that it causes? Your responsibility, according to the scrum guide, is to “[ensure] that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood.” That includes the scrum team and your stakeholders. Can you say that you are achieving that while keeping a straight face?

The Problems With Huge Product Backlogs

• Lack of focus - you will struggle to focus your team around the product goal with so many stakeholders inquiring about their items on the backlog
• Lack of transparency - a product owner should know about all the items in their product backlog and with a giant backlog looking for a specific item may be akin to looking for a needle in a haystack
• Capacity problems - adding more items to the product backlog than can be resolved by the team will compound all the other problems that come along with a big product backlog
• Massively increased lead times - the time it takes from an item being added to the product backlog to it actually making it into the increment will keep growing
• Less value delivered per sprint - having too many items in your product backlog will decrease your ability to find the most valuable plan of action for the team each sprint
• Steadily decreasing stakeholder satisfaction - even though you added the item to the backlog to satisfy the stakeholder, the result may be that the increased waiting times for valuable increments and the decreasing value of each increment will lead to a decline in overall satisfaction

How?to?Get?Out?of?This?Mess

I may do all the nutritionists out there a disservice with the following analogy, but the only way to lose weight is to consume less than you expend. This goes for calories in our body, but also for items in our backlog. You should already have a general idea on how many items the team can deliver each sprint (if not, then talk to your scrum master). As long as you add less than is resolved, you will slowly and steadily slim down your product backlog without any need of complex analysis.

This, however, may take a long time and time is money. Another great way of keeping your product backlog slim and streamlined towards valuable product improvements is to focus all items around your current product goal. It’s actually what the scrum guide recommends:

The Product Goal is in the Product Backlog. The rest of the Product Backlog emerges to define “what” will fulfill the Product Goal.

Sort all the other items out of your product backlog and categorize them in a broader roadmap, then work with the specific stakeholders to sort that roadmap to reflect a general long-term plan which may or may not materialize. From then on out, spend as little time and energy as possible to work on those future items. Focus on the task at hand.

I’ve also seen a lot of talk on my feed about learning to say “no”. It’s certainly also a viable tool in your kit as a product owner. Not everything the customer wants may be a good idea for your product. Your job is not to only convert the requests and wishes of your stakeholders into product backlog items, but rather to understand their desires and pain points and then find way of solving those with your product. The customer knows their problems, but not necessarily how to solve them - you should!

The?Fruits?of?Your?Labor

With a slim and focused product backlog, you will soon see the team productivity increase. The increase in speed and value will reflect in a better stakeholder mood - even amongst those who may initially feel left out if you do not add their ideas to the backlog right away. It will feel like a dam has broken and your team will knock out that product goal in record time. You may even find that you will have to put in more work in order to get enough items ready before each planning. Good thing that you now have more time on your hands as you only need to focus on a small subset of items!

It is well worth it to master the challenges of filtering your customer needs and desires and keeping your product backlog neat and concise. If you are one of the 47% of people who have many future items in their backlogs, then I hope you will give this tactic a go. Do let me know what you think in the comments, I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this.