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we use Atlassian. My engineering team works on a Jira Kanban that only contains tickets that are soon to be worked on (read: within the next days, tops), there

we use Atlassian. My engineering team works on a Jira Kanban that only contains tickets that are soon to be worked on (read: within the next days, tops), there is no backlog at all, and engineers are encouraged to put technical findings there and pull them if the team considers it important enough to act on it. In addition, our product team works with the "Product Discovery" tool from atlassian, where they collect Ideas/Features/..., determines the RICE score for each, and does the back-and-forth with people, until they are reasonably sure what to put into the engineering kanban next, always having the "WIP limit" in mind. Therefore the giant "icebox" is out-of-sight but the social factor of "there is a ticket for my idea" across the company is also fulfilled. works pretty well so far!

skydhash 3y ago
Nice! Having the same ticket going for months because it's always low priority, but always coming back during grooming is not a good feeling. I don't mind having a huge list of tasks, but only if I know they're going to be done eventually.
MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
This is the answer. You can solve this problem with tools; you don't have to change your philosophy. When your company has 5 projects, do you count Project Z's backlog against Project X's backlog? No you don't, even though they are both in the same database. The reason you're OK with this is because your teams' views have been adjusted so that they only see their own project. So they each see what they consider to be their own backlog. Use the same approach for low-priority requests: put them in the same database, but don't elevate them to the team's backlog view. If someone has an idea or a request you should not suppress it entirely. That will only encourage people to add yet another system of logging to your organization. Just because a request is not urgent or can't be put on the roadmap yet does not mean it's not important. And why throw away what can be logged for later archeology? "Oh hey the answer to this new problem is right here in this old request we never got around to."

skydhash 3y ago

Nice! Having the same ticket going for months because it's always low priority, but always coming back during grooming is not a good feeling. I don't mind having a huge list of tasks, but only if I know they're going to be done eventually.

MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago

This is the answer. You can solve this problem with tools; you don't have to change your philosophy. When your company has 5 projects, do you count Project Z's backlog against Project X's backlog? No you don't, even though they are both in the same database. The reason you're OK with this is because your teams' views have been adjusted so that they only see their own project. So they each see what they consider to be their own backlog. Use the same approach for low-priority requests: put them in the same database, but don't elevate them to the team's backlog view. If someone has an idea or a request you should not suppress it entirely. That will only encourage people to add yet another system of logging to your organization. Just because a request is not urgent or can't be put on the roadmap yet does not mean it's not important. And why throw away what can be logged for later archeology? "Oh hey the answer to this new problem is right here in this old request we never got around to."