Parking lot, not backlog
Backlogs exist because building was scarce. Now the scarcity inverts: ideas accumulate faster than humans can curate. The asset becomes a small, well-pruned parking lot of bets, not a 600-ticket queue.
“Backlog grooming is dead weight. Replace it with a weekly parking-lot review where bets either ship, sharpen, or get cut.”
Strategic implications
- 1Cap the parking lot. Force trade-offs.
- 2Tag every entry with a hypothesis and a kill criterion. No naked ideas.
- 3Treat "won't do" as a first-class outcome. Celebrate cuts.
Print your backlog. Cross out anything older than 90 days that nobody has championed. That's your starting parking lot.
Personal opinion, not analysis. Dated above; revisit if the conditions change.
Why the backlog is broken
The backlog is an artifact of an era when building was the scarce resource. Ideas piled up because shipping them was expensive, so the backlog became a cold-storage queue of "things we'd build if we had the hands."
The economics flipped. Building is now cheap; deciding what's worth building is the new scarce resource. A 600-ticket backlog isn't an asset, it's a maintenance burden — every grooming session is dead time spent re-litigating ideas that nobody is championing.
What replaces it
A parking lot. Differences from a backlog:
- Capped. Hard limit (e.g., 30 entries). Adding a new bet forces a conversation about which existing one gets cut.
- Hypothesis-tagged. Every entry has a one-line hypothesis ("we believe X will improve Y by Z amount") and a kill criterion ("if A fails, we drop this").
- Championed. Every entry has a named owner. Unowned entries auto-expire after 90 days.
- Reviewed weekly, not groomed. A 30-minute weekly check: ship, sharpen, or cut. No "we'll get to it later."
Why "cut" is the most underused outcome
Most teams over-index on shipping and under-index on cutting. A clean cut is editorial work — it says "we're not building this, here's why" — and the absence of that work is what lets backlogs metastasize.
Make cutting visible. Track cuts as a metric alongside ships. Celebrate the one in retro. The bias toward closure is what keeps the parking lot small enough to be useful.
Counter-argument
Some orgs need a real backlog because their stakeholders demand visibility into "what comes next." For them, a parking lot looks like neglect.
The honest answer: keep a public roadmap (the next 1–2 quarters of committed work) for stakeholders, and a private parking lot for the team's working set. Two artifacts, two audiences. Don't conflate them.