I’ll bet your team has a long backlog. Very long.

I hope I’m wrong. But I’m probably not.

It’s probably growing, too.

No matter how big your team. No matter how much you automate. No matter what shortcuts you take, or corners you cut. No matter what you do, it keeps growing.

Why is this?

Quite simply, because it’s easier to think of new ideas than to implement them.

This is a pretty universal truth.

If your team is one of the rare ones without a long backlog, it probably means you’re just more proactive about discarding ideas that aren’t likely to be implemented, than that you don’t have new ideas.

And we can learn something from these types of teams. Namely: We’ll never get all the work done, so we need to choose only the most important work to do.

And what’s more, the sooner we can filter out the ideas we won’t implement, the better off we’ll be. Because we won’t have them hanging over our heads. And we won’t have to manage them.

How are you selecting which items to keep in your backlog, and which items to throw away?