Product Definition · master area
Backlog Management
Keep the story map current. Pull ready stories. Backlogs are curated by decision, not accumulated by default. A 600-item backlog is a backlog that has stopped being read.
Owners: PO Phase it lives in: What We Build → How We Build The corpus principle this enacts: Technical debt is unresolved decisions in the chain — including the backlog's unresolved decisions.
Where it lives in the chain
- What We Build · Story Map — the canon
How to do this
The PO's weekly backlog read:
- What's ready to pull? Stories with DoR satisfied, in priority order. Top of the column.
- What needs grooming? Stories that are close but need a brief refinement, an amigos session, or an open question resolved.
- What's gone cold? Stories that haven't moved in 6+ weeks. Either reactivate, defer to next quarter, or kill. Never let them rot at the bottom.
- What's been overtaken? Stories where the cycle's learning has made them obsolete. Kill explicitly, with a one-line note. "Killed 2026-05-18 — the new shortcut design makes this redundant."
What good practice looks like
The backlog has a known shape and a known size. "Three Epics active; about 60 stories across them; 12 ready to pull; 8 in grooming; 40 in deeper backlog." The PO can walk through it in 20 minutes at the bi-weekly sync without scrolling past anything.
The backlog is the team's working surface, not an archive. Stories that exist for posterity belong in the issue tracker's archive view, not in the active backlog. A backlog used as a wish-list-of-everything-anyone-ever-mentioned is a backlog that nobody trusts.
The PO's most important backlog action is killing. Every story killed sharpens the team's focus on what remains; every story kept that shouldn't be is a low-grade tax on every backlog read for the rest of the project.
Related crafts
- Story Mapping — the visual the backlog feeds
- Slicing & Prioritization — how stories get release order
- Artifact Lifecycle — the same discipline at the corpus level