Time for a Product Backlog Cleanup? Here’s Some Tips that can Help
If you ask any product owner what a healthy product backlog should look like, most of the time they’ll get it perfectly right. But even when you know in theory what the product backlog should contain, many times it looks entirely different in reality.
Cleaning up your backlog helps you and your team focus on what matters most. Without being distracted by the noise of all the unnecessary items, you have a clearer vision of your goal. Unfortunately, with each passing day new ideas, low priority bugs, UI improvements, feature requests, and nice-to-have work items pile up in your product backlog. And, as more pressing work comes in, you push everything else to the bottom of your list. This is when you know you have to get to work.
As with any large cleaning project, you may feel overwhelmed. “Where do I start? What do I keep and what do I throw away? What if I get rid of the wrong item?”
The thought of not knowing where to start and the fear of deleting something that we might need in the future, leads many product owners to postpone this task over and over again. The good news is it doesn’t have to be that difficult! Below you’ll find some tips you can apply to make it easier.
When is the right time for a product backlog cleanup?
1. You don’t know what most of the items in your product backlog are even about
The longer the list of backlog items gets, the more difficult it is to remember what the purpose was for each and every story.
What can you do about it? Avoid keeping such stories on the product backlog. When you can’t remember what they’re about, it might be because they are not tied to any product goal. It could have just been an idea you thought was good to keep for later analysis.
Remember– items that are not tied to a goal or to the product vision just crowd your backlog, making it difficult to prioritize.
2. There is a small part you keep refining while you ignore everything else
A product backlog should contain only items you committed to work on, as well as items that you can place on an approximate timeline. Everything else can lead to confusion and ambiguity; you can’t see through the clutter to see what’s next.
You know that your backlog is too complex when you only refine what is at the top. All the rest gets further and further from being implemented.
3. User stories that are older than 6 months still waiting to be implemented
When a new initiative comes up, you’re going to invest the time in that instead of remaining backlog items from a previous initiative. If it wasn’t a priority back then, it probably won’t ever be. Not to mention, while you’re working on this new initiative, another one is waiting in the line. So any old work items that are in the backlog can be discarded with confidence.
Don’t worry about mistakenly deleting an item you may need in the future. If it’s important enough, it will come up again in your discussions.
However, if deleting work items still worries you, know there are tools, such as Jira’s archive feature, that allow you to archive backlog items. This will hide the items instead of deleting them, and you can retrieve them in the archive list at any time.
Tips to guide you through the backlog cleanup phase
Tip 1: Be prepared to give up all the ideas you gathered along the way
From my experience, this task can make one feel anxious. Why? Because there’s a whole slew of ideas we’ve gathered based on our experience with the product or improvements that we think our users might appreciate. But is this something that we validated with the users, or are just assumptions we’ve made?
When this situation arises, try comparing these ideas against the new work coming up. Ask yourself, “what is more valuable? Some item that I keep pushing away, thinking that one day I might make some time to analyze it? Or a new functionality that has already been validated?”
Tip 2: Group backlog items into buckets based on priority
How can you establish priority? It’s simple. Look at your current and any next initiative on the roadmap and determine if the item you want to remove relates to what you are trying to build next.
After you determine this, you also have to think about where it stands compared to the other stories. “Is it something that will break the functionality if not implemented? Will it truly improve users’ experience or is it just a nice-to-have feature?”
With these questions answered, you can establish how important this item is and assign the corresponding priority tag. Once you’ve tagged all user stories, you’ll obtain a prioritized list. Now it’s easier to decide what to keep on the backlog and what to remove.
Tip 3: Keep a separate board for items that are not ready to go in your backlog
Besides backlog items that pertain to previous initiatives, some product owners collect on the backlog feature requests. These can come from users or other departments within the organization.
While some items should be completely deleted from your backlog, some can still be promoted at some point on the roadmap, even if they don’t require immediate attention.
One thing that helps in the backlog cleanup process is having a separate board for any relevant user feedback, feature requests, or other requests from marketing, sales or other departments within the company. To do so, follow these steps:
- Create a separate board
- Create buckets based on the criteria you want to group the items; it could be areas of the product or who requested the feature
- Decide what items are worth being transferred from the backlog to the new board and what should be deleted. You can delete items that are not tied to the product goal and vision, items that wouldn’t have a significant impact, and you should keep the valuable feedback and requests from the people who are using your product.
- For every new initiative, check the new board to see if there is anything that relates to the upcoming work and if you can add it to the product backlog.
Conclusions
A clean backlog will help you to better organize your work and visualize your plan for the future sprints. While there may be some valuable feedback and requests on the backlog, if you don’t plan to do anything about it soon, it’s better to keep it separate, on another board.
However, when you start the cleaning process, don’t just move everything to another board without a proper triage. All you’ll end up with is another incohesive list.
Cleaning up the backlog doesn’t mean you have to delete everything that you are not currently working on. Organize it correctly and you’ll give everyone on your team transparency about your current and future work.
