If you lead any kind of development, then I am talking to you. And I am telling you to just stop maintaining backlogs.
We keep saying that the world has never moved this fast, yet we pretend that backlog items written six months ago still matter. If they truly did, we would have finished them by now. New and more important tasks will arrive, and if anything in your ageing backlog still matters, it will resurface by itself.
Instead, write a short product goal. Clear, compact, living. Easy to adjust when reality changes, because it will.
Then you work on what matters most, week by week and day-to-day.
For bigger projects, create a design document. It describes how things will look when done. But at any point, you can decide that what you have so far is good enough. Then you simply stop referring to it. No action needed.
For tiny issues that cannot be fixed right away, the person who cares most writes it down on a personal post-it and brings to the next planning meeting. If the post-it gets lost, either it was important and will resurface, or it wasn’t.
Once I was no longer tied to a product backlog, I found a real gem. I could finally listen to our customers, for real. I sit with them as they use our product. And when they find a bug that should never have existed, or get stuck on a usability feature that was anything but usable, I say “I hear you; we will fix that on Monday”, and mean it. In all my years, at every company and job I have had, I have never met a customer who was not satisfied with that answer.
So delete your backlog.
Start listening.
And build what actually matters, on Monday.
Less theatre. More progress