Don’t be a slave to the backlog.

I’ve been spending a lot of time helping one client with their 2011 Product Roadmap. Although we’re not “doing Agile,” I’ve introduced them to the product backlog. So far it’s been a powerful planning tool. So Scott Sehlhorst’s post on how to prioritize resonated with me.

When creating a backlog, or managing features, you need to remember that feature priority is a tool to be used to plan your work. Don’t get too specific about the exact rank of individual items, and remember that the eventual order of implementation should reflect what from a business, technical, and user perspective. It’s a compromise. The backlog is the beginning of knowledge, not the end. 

Don’t be a slave to the backlog.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s