Deleting the Product Backlog Is Your Salvation to Be Agile
Once the old goes away, the door opens for the new.
Published in
5 min readNov 16, 2021
Before I start telling you why deleting your Product Backlog is your key to freedom, let me ask you some questions:
- How many items do you have in your Product Backlog?
- When did you create your oldest Product Backlog Item?
- How often do you refine something with your Scrum Team that never makes it to a Sprint but still has a safe place in your Product Backlog?
Please, take your time to reflect on these questions. It’s important to be brutally honest. Once I asked the same questions to myself, and I got the following:
- 450 Product Backlog Items.
- Three years and seven months was my oldest Product Backlog Item.
- At least 100 items were refined, estimated, and never made to a Sprint.
When I reflected on this situation, I was sure of only one thing:
I missed the mark of what being Agile means.
Now let me share with you why deleting your Product Backlog might be your salvation for being Agile.