Burn Your Backlog

Every team I’ve ever seen maintains a backlog. Every team I’ve ever been on pretends they’ll get to it someday, and they never do.

The backlog aint a roadmap. It’s a graveyard of forgotten promises, good intentions, half-baked ideas and easy ways not to say no to someone. Like that box of wires I’m almost certain you’ve got in your house with a SCART to RGB cable - you think you’ll need it, but you won’t. VHS isn’t coming back and you’re not going to do a ticket called “refactor search”.

I’m not saying you should be reckless (but if you want to be I’m all for that). What I’m saying is: that massive backlog isn’t helping your team. It’s full of stuff that just doesn’t matter - which you know because if it did matter it’d be in last week’s cycle.

Every now and then, someone gets ambitious and tries to prune it. “Hey team, let’s clean up the backlog this sprint,” they’ll suggest cheerily. Bless them. Two hours later you’ve got a slightly nicer list of things you still won’t do and a deep melancholy.

So don’t prune it, just burn it. Set a limit: if a ticket’s older than three months (linear will even do it for you if you want), it gets auto-deleted. Gone. Finished. If it’s truly important, it’ll find its way back again, probably with clearer requirements and actual urgency. If it doesn’t, well, I’m sure you’ll find something else to do.

But what about all those great ideas? I’m sure your backlog contains some genuinely clever ideas. But that’s the thing about ideas - they’re cheap, abundant, and resilient. If they’re really great, they will come back up when the timing’s right.

What you gain by torching your backlog is clarity. You focus on what’s in front of you. The big projects or the critical bugs. Your team feels lighter, quicker, less bogged down by the ghosts of sprints past.

Go ahead. Burn your backlog. It’s cathartic.

Unless it’s a legal requirement. Then yeah, don’t