Escape that vertigo-inducing, over-stuffed backlog

We’ve all been there.

If you're anything like a typical product person, you've had a Jira or Trello board stuffed to the brim with tickets that will never see the light of day. It stresses out your developers who are looking down the barrel of a million unfinishable tasks, and it freaks out the rest of your team who are just wondering why their ideas go to die!

Problem: Black-hole of a backlog where ideas disappear.

It’s not uncommon for teams to have overwhelming backlogs, usually a mix of all the tickets they could conceive of, stuffed into one tool that's meant for more streamlined task management. It means that the developers lack clarity on exactly what to build next, and the rest of the team doesn’t know what’s really in the pipeline or why some ideas make it to production and others simply don’t.

It’s easy to spot if your team is in this spot, as it's often indicated by: 

• Your backlog is all in one place, regardless of whether the tickets are for delivery (execution) or discovery (figuring out strategy).
• A lack of transparency into the product management space. People on the team regularly need to ask the product person for updates, rather than being able to see for themselves.
• Great ideas being lost amongst the mess of bad or ‘just good’ ideas, with no process for validating and lifting the best ideas up.

Solution: Separate backlogs for strategy and execution.

A better approach is to separate strategy from execution. Use development tools like Jira and Trello for what they are good at: project/task management for development. This category of tools is great for managing the flow of tickets through the delivery/execution side of the process, but quickly get overwhelmed when forced to handle all tickets, including ideas, experiments, insights and other things that may or may not ever actually get built.

Manage your ideas, experiments and other insights separately, as these play a really key part in helping your team understand your strategy. You should be able to:

• Compare ideas against the objectives or problems they are meant to tackle.
• Group ideas, feedback and other insights together to build a case for making a product decision.
• Track the progress of work from inception of the idea (or realization of the problem) through to completion, including stages after launch, especially validation.
  
  

ProdPad was specifically designed to help here, by providing a space for discovery (before anything is built) and validation (after something is built), while connecting directly with development tools like Jira, Trello, and many more, to give you a window into the process while something is being built. 

In ProdPad, you can customize your workflow stages to match your team’s preferred way of working. 

Typically, you would include:

• Discovery and other phases that come before development.
• Development phases that are 2-way sync’d with Jira, Trello or other popular development tools.
• Post-development phases, like validation, contacting customers, launch steps, etc.

Ideas start off as new in ProdPad, move along the stages, and when you’re ready, are pushed to development with a single click of a button.

In this way, you get the best of both worlds: a safe space for discovery of ideas and validation of problems, as well as a tidy and easy to follow delivery space in your development tool. Your developers are happy because they're able to keep using their usual development tools which are now much tidier and more streamlined, your non-tech team is much happier as they are able to see where their ideas have ended up and can follow along with the progress, and your product team is much more effective at their jobs!  

You can explore this workflow view and 'window into dev' live in our Sandbox environment: https://sandbox.prodpad.com/ideas/?ideasView=workflow

ProdPad solves the stressful backlog problem and many others!

Have you got other problems you're looking to solve?

• We're stuck in a feature factory. 
  (but want to focus on outcomes instead)
  
  
• My backlog is an over-stuffed mess. 👈 YOU ARE HERE
  (and want something easier and tidier!)
  
  
• I need to validate we’re actually solving problems.
  (instead of building things without measuring their success)
  
  
• I want to solve customer problems and keep them in the loop.
  (to end that disconnect with our customers)
  
  

PS. Want all of these in a presentation format so you can convince your boss and team to use ProdPad to solve these problems? Grab your copy here!