Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about backlogs. They’re equal parts a treasure trove of ideas and the dark corner where ideas are left and often forgotten about.
Everyone has a backlog. Within a single company, each function even has their own list of ideas. Support has a catalogue of customer issues. Marketing has a list of tweaks, messaging updates, and optimizations. Product and Eng obviously have a list of bugs and todos.
Yet, if you ask anyone, most of the ideas never see the light of day. So, why do we keep them around?
Ultimately, I think it boils down to the belief that ideas are precious and fleeting. We don’t want to lose the takeaways from the brainstorm session or the UI improvements from that one customer. We’re afraid we’ll forget. So, we add them to a list. That list eventually gets dusty and old because the friction to “add it to the backlog” is far lower than the work required to build it.
The truth is good ideas always boomerang back. Good ideas aren’t that fragile. You can try to forget them, but they’ll find you again. Several other customers will bump into that same issue. Multiple people will remember that one thing everyone was excited about during the brainstorm.
Basecamp shared this idea in the classic Shape Up (emphasis mine):
It’s easy to overvalue ideas. The truth is, ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and accumulate into big piles. Really important ideas will come back to you.
If you run a product team though, this raises the obvious question: If you don’t put everything into a backlog, what should you do with it?
I believe ideas, bugs, suggestions, and requests should go one of two ways:
- This is urgent. It’s blocking critical business processes or creating a major impediment for customers. It’s impactful enough to interrupt our work now.
- This is interesting. This could be something we do. It might be impactful.
In the first example, it gets worked on soon – this cycle/sprint or next. Most things fall in the second camp though. In these scenarios, the default reaction is to toss a ticket in the backlog so we don’t lose it. This is how backlogs get unmanageable and unwieldy. The better response is to say “Maybe.” Then, ask questions and learn about the opportunity, not the specific suggestion.
Let’s ground this in a specific example. When I was working at WordPress.com, themes represented a challenge for customers. We had a beautiful catalog, but customers struggled to get their site looking exactly like the demo. They would cancel their subscription out of frustration. Suggestions abounded across the team. Improve the documentation, automatically import demo content, offer 1:1 theme setups, filter the list of themes displayed to a more manageable list, and more.
If we were to track all of these ideas, we’d have at least a dozen tickets in our backlog, none of which we’re really committed to building. All of which grow stale and create this gnawing sense of drag and weight on the team. The truth is all of these ideas ladder up to the same opportunity – customers don’t know how to set up their site.
We can track the opportunity in the context of our business using an Opportunity Solution tree (much more on that in another post). For example, here’s how you could think of the theme-related opportunities as it pertains to activation (a key metric the business cares about).
- Hgh-level metric: % of users with a published post in the first 7 days
- Broad opportunity: I don’t know how to get my site looking the way I want.
- Actionable sub-opportunities: I can’t get my theme to look like the demo.
This offers many benefits but two in particular:
- Since many ideas ladder up to the same opportunity, we have much less to manage. In the example above, we store one opportunity compared to 15 suggestions.
- The opportunity is captured in the context of the business. We have a better grasp of what we’re hoping to accomplish.
During planning cycles, we bet on opportunities, not ideas. The right question isn’t “Should do this ticket around demo content?” Instead, it’s “Given everything we know about our business, is this the right opportunity to address?” Once you’re committed to an opportunity, you can ask the question, “How should we address it?” The good suggestions will all boomerang back.