Elezea: resources for product leaders - Don't delete your backlog
Welcome to another edition of the Elezea Newsletter with articles and resources for product managers, technology leaders, and other curious minds. This is a summary newsletter and if you’d like to get all the blog posts you can subscribe to the feed in a variety of ways. There’s a sentiment I started to see in the agile development world that advocates for deleting old/stale items off a backlog completely. A good recent example is Jason Knight’s latest newsletter:
I’m not trying to pick on Jason—his work is great and it’s another very good edition of his newsletter! I am just using it as an example that got me thinking about this a bit more deeply. My take is that we should absolutely keep all customer feedback around in our backlogs, because that is continuous discovery data that would be a shame to lose. Instead, my proposal would be to normalize the backlog as a place to build organizational memory and a customer feedback knowledge base—not as a list of things that all have to get done. Two tactics can help with this approach. First, a Now/Next/Later roadmap keeps the focus on the list of current priorities. The entire backlog doesn’t go into the “Later” column—only things that are currently prioritized to start within the next few months. Second, have a standard process that the entire company (especially the customer success team) can use to collect user feedback and attach it to features. In our case that’s Productboard, and our success team can easily add and process customer feedback via a browser extension. I guess our list of features in Productboard is technically our “backlog”, but it doesn’t cause us stress in terms of feeling like we need to work on everything that’s on there. However, as part of our planning cycle we can go through this list and figure out if anything is important enough to pull into the “Later” column of our roadmap. An added bonus: if/when we start to work on any of those features we have access to lots of customer data about each feature, and we can reach out to those customers to have more in-depth conversations with them about their needs. So instead of deleting old issues off our backlogs, let’s rather remove the pressure and stigma around what backlogs are for (maybe we should rename it to “customer needs knowledge base”?). And then let’s use our actual roadmaps for the list of things we know we’re going to work on. Marco Rogers has been an engineer and manager of engineers for 20 years. In this posthe shares some short, practical (but not always easy to follow!) advice for engineers. A few of my favorites:
Read the rest of his post for the rest. What would happen if we look at time through the lens of attachment theory? That’s the question my friend Simon de la Rouviere asks in Attachment Styles to Time. I definitely have an “anxious attachment style” with time:
The framing also reminds me of the Japanese phrase Mono no aware:
That is also basically what the entire “synthwave” genre is about so if you’d like to hear what that concept sounds like as a song, just make your way over to Los Angeles by The Midnight. Some Stray Links
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