The backlog dilemma

When every half-baked idea, bug, and improvement all ends up in one place — your backlog — you may be tempted to ask: what if we just stopped managing the backlog?

As in, stopped asking for clarification on vaguely described tickets. Ignored inconsistent tags. And freely allowed stale ideas to languish.

In all likelihood, your backlog would quickly become chaos. And planning your roadmap would somehow become even more of a challenge.

But you’d be free from feeling like you have to stay on top of it, and free of the tedious upkeep required to process every ticket.

In reality of course, no product team excels working with a chaotic backlog. You risk losing track of promising ideas and missing high-priority fixes, adding to the overall clutter and confusion.

So the backlog ought to be managed — maybe just not by you…

Today, we manually summon AI to summarize or respond to one-off requests, but what if every ticket filed was reviewed, refined, and triaged to your exact specifications, without lifting a finger?

You could reliably navigate hundreds of fixes and improvements in seconds. Planning sprints wouldn’t feel like a losing game of hide and seek. And good ideas earmarked for later won’t go missing by the time your team finally has the bandwidth.

Offloading the backlog legwork may have sounded like a flight of fancy a mere few years ago, but now it’s a reality just around the corner. And it promises to make light of our quaint routines and customs, just like so many innovations before.

Remember printing and memorizing Mapquest directions?

Well, managing the backlog will become just that: a fading memory of how we used to work. We’ll be free to get back to exploring and building the ideas that got us here to begin with.

Ready to stop managing your backlog? Sign up for early access to Height 2.0.