The Life-Changing Focus of a Clean Backlog

Overview

Your backlog isn’t a museum or a wish list. It’s a tool to focus the team. In this episode, Peter Green and Richard Lawrence show how to remove the weight of old commitments, keep ideas without letting them run your life, and steer by purpose using a clear three-zone system.

Key Ideas

• Big backlogs create hidden stress: GTD calls it the weight of open commitments.
• Use a Kondo-style move: thank old items for what they taught you, then let them go.
• Sort into Active (PO Board flow), Archive (reference, not action), and Someday/Maybe (review on a schedule).
• When pruning won’t work, declare Backlog Bankruptcy—rename the old list and rebuild top-down.
• Stewardship matters: a clean backlog protects team focus and improves forecasting.

Mentioned in This Episode

• • Getting Things Done — David Allen
  • The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up — Marie Kondo
  • Course: 80/20 Product Backlog Refinement
  • Product: Team Launch Sequence
  • Related episode: The PO Board

Episode Transcript

Peter Green: Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show. I’m Peter Green here with Richard Lawrence. We recently received a note from a product owner friend of ours, and the note said, Richard and Peter, how can you kill a story? I have items in my backlog that are three years old, and we’re never gonna get to them, but stakeholders want to keep track of them so we don’t lose track of it in the future.
Richard, how do you answer this question? It’s one we’ve heard a lot.

Richard Lawrence: Yeah, this product owner is not alone. I’ve been doing an informal survey of groups of product owners for several years now, and I ask them two questions. How long is your backlog today? If you stopped adding to it and let your team work through it, how long would it take?
And second, what percentage of those items will never hit the top of the backlog? Something will always jump over them. They’ll turn out not to be useful. They’ll totally change shape by the time they hit the top and be unrecognizable. My favorite is something hits the top and you say, wait, does that person even work here anymore?
Who asked for this? So I’ve been asking those two questions of product owners for several years and, kind of informally keeping track of the answers. And the middle of the bell curve here is two to four years and 50 to 75%. So most backlogs are two to four years long, and more than half of that stuff will never hit the top of the backlog.

Peter: Wow. So those backlogs are primarily a museum of previous good intentions?

Richard: Yeah. Or as I sometimes say, the place where your stakeholder’s dreams go to die, that has a bunch of effects, right? There’s cognitive load of having to keep track of all those things. There’s just the time of managing them all and having to figure out when a new request comes in, is this already on here somewhere, and de-duplicate all those things, sort the right things, add details, report on what’s going on.
But I think there’s also some worse psychological and relational things that happen too. There’s a psychological weight from open commitments. David Allen talks about this as the thinking behind his Getting Things Done personal productivity method.
When we have open commitments, even if they’re just in our head, it weighs on us. It causes stress. And in relationships, open commitments cause stress. Like you may have this with a spouse or a close friend where one or the other of you is constantly promising to do things and not doing them. And it, it weighs on the relationship.
And that happens in backlogs too. When something gets added to a backlog, people start asking when they’re gonna get it and treating it as a commitment, even if you didn’t formally make a commitment.

Peter: Yeah. It’s so messy, and hard to fix. It reminds me, Richard, we were doing some preparation for Halloween, and I know we have a silver sharpie somewhere, and I asked Annie, my wife, Annie, where’s that silver sharpie? And she said, oh, it’s in the kitchen drawer. The kitchen drawer is the nice way to say the junk drawer, right? Speaking of where stuff goes to die. And I said, oh no, I’m not even gonna go in there. It’s gonna take me 10 minutes to, plow through the drawer. Eventually I went in, it did take me five minutes. I did find it in the drawer, but a lot of backlogs are like that: I know there’s something good in there, but it’s gonna take me forever to find it. I don’t even want to go there.

Richard: Right? Would you believe I saw for sale a junk drawer set the other day for your starter apartment. You can just buy a pre junked set of things to put in your drawer. Wow. Why? I dunno.

Peter: Well, as the original question suggests, many of us struggle convincing ourselves to delete those items, and I think most of that is just out of fear. Like, well, we might need it later. Or what if the stakeholders freak out? So it’s challenging.
Another reason that some of those ideas are hard to kill and just delete, is that there might be some gems in there. There might be a silver sharpie hiding in there somewhere and we don’t wanna forget about it.
Even that one, which might have a kernel of truth to it, it’s probably not worth the downside since I think they’re just better ways to come up with great ideas for what we might do in the future, not sorting through all the old stuff that we used to think was important.
I’ve done that exercise where I’ve pulled up the backlog and I just said, what are some of the big things in here that are a year old? And it was like a trip down memory lane, and it didn’t inspire any cool new ideas.

Richard: Right. I think the cognitive bias that’s at play here is what psychologists call loss aversion. We value the things we have more than the things that we don’t have yet. And that means it’s hard to give things up. I might need it one day.
And you know where the best place I’ve found an antidote to loss aversion is? Marie Kondo. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has the best antidote for loss aversion I’ve ever seen, and it’s kind of silly.
She says when you’re going through, maybe, all your socks and figuring out what to keep and what to give away, you handle each of them. You decide in her words what sparks joy, and we can take or leave that, maybe come back to it in a moment for the backlog. But the part that really stands out to me is when you decide something doesn’t sufficiently spark joy and you need to get rid of it.
You don’t just get rid of it, you thank it out loud, presumably by yourself in the room for what it did for you, putting the focus on the value you already got instead of the value you might get. And that undermines loss aversion in a really healthy way. You can let it go and appreciate what it did and move on.

Peter: There are probably some backlog items that legitimately spark joy when you read it. Probably most of ’em, that’s not the emotion we feel. There are positive emotions, but what’s the ‘spark joy’ version for a backlog item?

Richard: Yeah. When you’re working on that big enterprise, a software project there, there’s probably not a lot of sparks in there, but what you can evaluate is, does this feel like it’s gonna move our vision and purpose forward?
We’re excited about doing this work for some reason, it’s creating some big outcome. And then I think you want each of your backlog items to feel like, man, if we get this done, that’s gonna move the needle towards this bigger thing we care about.

Peter: So when we’re talking about cleaning up a house, Richard, I think most of us have experienced what a clean house feels like. If not our own, we’ve, we’ve been to nice hotels, or to that one friend who’s really cleanly or to an open house. We know what a clean house feels like.
I don’t know that everyone knows what a clean backlog feels like, and so it’s useful to think about what would that, what would that look like? What would it feel like, where the backlog is lightweight. There’s real clarity just browsing through it on what actually matters. Every item in the backlog has a reason to exist connected to that purpose that we mentioned earlier. So to create this, I think it’s useful to filter our backlog into three categories: the active product backlog, the archive, which is probably not even what we consider the product backlog, but it’s items from the product backlog that we filter to be archived, and then a section we call ‘someday maybe.’

Peter: So let’s walk through those three categories. The active, this is the PO board columns that we talk about in the episode on the PO board, which we’ll link to in the show notes. If you think of sorting your product backlog into three categories at the top, the middle and the bottom, turning those into Kanban style lanes.
So the strategic items would be the items at the bottom of your backlog, big and fuzzy. Those go left. In the middle column, we have your next quarter’s roadmap of features. That goes into the next column. Then on the right we have the next two sprints or so worth of refined items, thinly sliced. Clear. Probably estimated. And if an item’s not part of that flow, it’s not actually in your product backlog.

Richard: And then you have what Peter called the archive, which would be the, could be the old stuff that you haven’t looked at in a while. Could be just people’s ideas that haven’t made it into the product backlog. So sometimes rather than calling this an archive and having it just be a historic record, I’ll sometimes call it our ‘Ideas List.’
It’s things we know about that haven’t been promoted to active, or someday maybe, and often this even lives in a different tool than your backlog.

Peter: And then that third category, the someday maybe list, I think we stole that title, borrowed maybe?

Richard: Yeah. That’s a David Allen concept. I had it as a personal someday maybe list before I realized that’s useful for my clients.

Peter: We use it, I think, slightly differently. There’s some overlap there. He says like, put it there so you that you aren’t thinking about it. You need to capture it. And then so, one category of someday maybe are your crazy ideas. These are interesting things. They might turn into something in the future.
This is like, should Humanizing Work accept crypto as payment? I don’t know. Maybe sometime in the future. Let’s not worry about it, but let’s get it on the backlog so we’re not thinking about it. And then I think the other category is, stakeholder, please leave me alone. It’s in my backlog. But it’s clear that it’s not at the top of it. You’re not gonna get to it for a long time because of the label. It’s the someday maybe. I have captured it though.

Richard: Yeah, and I recommend product owners check out their someday, maybe on a schedule. So they’re mostly not thinking about it. You know, you’re gonna get to it quarterly and see, have the conditions changed where crypto should be on your backlog now, or the thing that you’ve said no to for years, has it become relevant to your purpose?
And you can bring it in, otherwise forget about it for the next quarter. Now when it comes to getting a backlog into this kind of shape if you’re like the product owners I survey, with two to four years of stuff on there that mostly won’t make it to the top you may not be able to prune your way to a good backlog. You might need to chop that thing down and replant.
It’s sort of like deciding that, you know, that house that we bought to flip actually isn’t really usable as a house. Let’s tear it down and build a new one. Or zero based budgeting where every line item has to be justified from scratch.
So if that’s you, declare backlog bankruptcy. And the way I would do that in a tool like say, JIRA, is literally rename your backlog to ideas as of, you know, October, 2025.
Start a new backlog that is named as your team’s backlog, and then start building it from the top, zero based budgeting style. Make things earn their way into the top.

Peter: Yeah, in our TLS backlog refinement section, we’ve got a booster session on that, and it’s the only booster session like this where you get to choose your own adventure.
You have two possible paths. You can start over with your backlog or you can refine existing items. And what we found is teams that have these sort of large overgrown backlogs, the bankruptcy path almost always gets them refocused on value much faster than trying to refine something out of their existing one.

Richard: Right, and to make that really tactical for our listeners, a common mistake is trying to build the backlog from the bottom, from the, big idea, break it down, break everything down even further, break everything down further, while your team waits for something to do. That’s not the move.
You start at the top with what’s the next most important outcome we need to accomplish, and what can we work on for about a sprint there? That gets your team a sprint worth of work. And while they’re working on that, you now have time to work from the top down on the backlog. So start building it from scratch at the top, not at the bottom

Peter: In our recent episode on how to say no without being a jerk. We talked about this idea of stewardship, as one of the techniques. And keeping a clean PO board style backlog is an act of stewardship of your team’s time.
It helps the team stay focused. It enables better forecasting and visibility into progress. And stakeholders that are asking for old items to be kept on the list are putting those benefits at risk. So as a good steward, put it in the archive, or the someday maybe categories.

Richard: Right, keep ’em on a list, just not that list.
So pick maybe a Friday afternoon and search for everything that hasn’t been touched in six months or a year, and move that over to the archive or ideas list. So you can always recover it. You’re not losing it forever, but thank it for what it did for you. It helped you understand these are things we’re not focusing on right now, and now we have a record of those things and we appreciate it.
You can always recover items from that archive, but you’ll never recover the focus it’s stealing if you leave it there.

Peter: For more on the PO board model and our best advice for keeping a backlog in good shape, check out our online course 80 20 Product Backlog Refinement, or register for an upcoming public workshop. And if you want hands-on help getting your unwieldy backlog in shape, reach out to us on the contact page at humanizingwork.com.

Richard: And if you got value from this episode and you’re watching on YouTube, would you please subscribe to our channel, like this episode, click that bell icon to get notified when a new episode drops, and leave a comment on how many items are in your current backlog, or how long your current backlog is, and how much of that will never make it to the top?

Peter: And if you’re listening on the podcast, a five star review makes a big difference in whether other people who’d benefit from the show find it or not.

Richard: Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Humanizing Work Show. We’ll see you next time.