Honey, I shrunk the backlog
summary
Argues for deliberately deleting large product backlogs roughly every three months and replacing them with OKR-driven, just-in-time story generation: use objectives to pick or create work instead of hoarding items. Cites a case where a team does 100 story points/month (7% of backlog) while backlog grows 7.5% — an underwater mortgage — and recommends simple changes like putting expiry dates on backlog entries. Uses Amazon Day One and zero‑based budgeting analogies and reports experiments where teams ran out of backlog and revalidated priorities.
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chapters (30)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:48Zero backlog myth
- 5:47Backlogs as success signs
- 7:14Backlogs as comfort objects
- 9:22Cost of saying yes
- 11:08Why backlogs don’t scale
- 13:16Discovery disrupts backlogs
- 15:46Replacing backlogs with OKRs
- 17:32What if backlog disappears
- 19:17Benefits of flushing backlogs
- 20:21Amazon’s day one mentality
- 21:47Zero-based budgeting
- 22:30Purpose missions goals
- 24:14Quarterly goals instead
- 25:39Just-in-time story generator
- 26:43Sprint planning without backlog
- 28:09Engaging developers in goals
- 29:33Sprint super cycle
- 31:03Engineering within constraints
- 33:31Failure of estimation
- 35:37Working to deadlines
- 36:20Avoiding goal displacement
- 37:22Sideline backlog without permission
- 38:25Expiry dates for backlog
- 38:47Expiry dates for bugs
- 39:31Objective-driven agile
- 40:19Why three-month resets
- 42:26Who owns product backlog
- 45:35Tools for ideas vs backlog bloat
- 46:58Closing remarks Q&A
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