We (kind of) deleted our backlog
Not exactly “deleted”; we’ve archived the backlog for future reference by moving the suggestions to another board.
Only our team has access to the archive, so the feature requests it contains are effectively deleted for the people who suggested and voted on them.
We then re-seeded our feedback board with the feature requests we’re most likely to implement in coming months. Go vote for what you'd most like to see added to Feature Upvote!
Why on earth would we delete our backlog?
We launched Feature Upvote in March 2017. Our public feedback board was a backlog of things our customers requested right back from day one.
There were too many items requested years ago that had only ever got a few votes, and that we would simply never consider implementing.
The business environment, our typical customer, and our company have all changed a lot in the last six years. What might have been an important request back then could be utterly uninteresting to anyone today.
It was time to start our feedback board afresh.
It wasn't a light decision; for months I've been considering the pros and cons of doing this, talking it through with other people.
In the end, being able to move existing suggestions to another board for future reference was what swayed me.
What if a feature request we’ve deleted does become important and popular? I’m confident it will soon be added again.
Should you delete your backlog?
Probably not! But you should regularly curate it, deleting the items that are old, that only received a few votes, and are simply making your backlog too long.
My rule of thumb is to regularly consider deleting items that:
- were first requested at least two years ago; and
- only ever received one of two votes; and
- would require a lot of work to implement and maintain; and
- are outside of our product vision.
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