Why Your Product Backlog Is a Graveyard with a Search Bar
Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
A product backlog that treats a multi-quarter platform bet and a CSS tweak as peer-level items is structurally broken. This article explains the flat backlog trap, where volume-based prioritization, recency bias, and false equivalence in scoring lead to a roadmap that optimizes for noise. It introduces the flight levels model to separate strategic, coordination, and operational decisions, and advocates for an initiative layer between objectives and ideas. It also critiques delivery tools like Jira for pushing teams toward output thinking, and recommends maintaining separate product and delivery backlogs.
Every sprint planning session started with the same ritual: scroll through the list, argue about what matters, pick things based on whoever made the strongest case that week, and move on feeling slightly defeated.