Is your backlog helping or holding you back?

Backlogs were meant to help agile teams focus on the right work. Instead, they often become one of the biggest barriers to delivering real value.

Allan Kelly shares a telling example: a development team diligently completed 7% of their backlog each month, yet kept falling further behind because their backlog was growing at 7.5%.

"It was like a mortgage where your monthly payments don’t even cover the interest."

This pattern plays out across organizations where traditional backlogs create three critical problems:

• They grow rather than shrink. Adding items costs nothing, while refusing ideas demands difficult conversations and political capital.
• They shift focus to output over outcomes. Teams celebrate completing backlog items rather than delivering meaningful customer value.
• They obscure strategic purpose. When facing hundreds of disconnected stories, how can anyone see the big picture?
  

Jeff Patton captures this perfectly by calling traditional, flat backlogs "bags of context-free mulch". We invest time building a rich tree of customer insights and context, only to pull out all the leaves, throw them in a bag as disconnected backlog items, and cut down the tree that gave them meaning.

A powerful alternative to this approach is User Story Mapping. By organizing work visually around the customer journey, User Story Maps preserve critical context, clarify value delivery, and make prioritization more intuitive. Teams stop arbitrarily selecting which isolated "leaf" to work on next and start seeing the whole tree - how features connect to goals, users, outcomes, and business impact.

When your backlog shows not just what you're building but why it matters and how it fits into the customer experience, you unlock better decisions, stronger alignment, and ultimately, more valuable software.

Below, we've pulled together some resources to help you rethink how you manage and prioritize your backlog.

Dive in.

Essential Reads on Backlog Grooming

5 agile estimation tips to help with backlog prioritization

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How to pair effective estimation techniques with backlog management to prioritize what really matters.

Read now >

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Essential checklist for effective backlog refinement (and what to avoid)

~5 min read‍

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How to run effective refinement sessions, prioritize with clarity, and keep your backlog healthy.

Check it out >

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The Agile Grapevine

Industry Pulse & Community Buzz

📝 Deleting your backlog: A founder’s guide to feature pruning

Arvid Kahl explores the psychology of letting go of backlog items and why this is essential for product focus.

Learn more >

💬 "Devs don't like backlog refining"

Teams discuss strategies for making refinement sessions more engaging and productive on Reddit.

Join the discussion >

‍Your turn.

Next time you look at your backlog, ask yourself: If we threw this away and started fresh based on current goals, how different would our priorities be?

Until next time!