Right now, we have over 200 ideas in our backlog across our suite of applications. Each of these ideas could take our product and development teams anywhere from 3 days to 3 months to fully define, build, and release. In total, this means we could keep our teams busy for 5 years with just the tasks we already have in mind, and new ideas are coming in every day. So, how do we prioritize this overwhelming list of possibilities?
Here’s the honest truth: we don’t.
I know this might sound unsettling. How can you manage your teams and workload if you don’t have everything prioritized? How do you create an impressive 5-year Gantt Chart roadmap without setting priorities?
Let me break it down.
In the past, we tried to manage our entire backlog. We would look at the long list of tasks and, with our metaphorical crystal ball, predict that Feature X (a highly requested feature by a major customer) would be ready in about 8 months. Our sales team would inform the customer, and everyone would be satisfied with this expectation.