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Tech Leader Fortune Cookie #120

By Marcus Blankenship

If your feature and bug backlog got wiped away today, what would you do?
What would be worse?
What would be better?

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About Marcus Blankenship

Where other technical coaches focus on process or tools, I focus on the human aspects of your Programmer to Manager transition. I help you hire the right people, create the right culture, and setup the right process which achieves your goals. Managing your team isn't something you learned in college. In fact, my clients often tell me "I never prepared for this role, I always focused on doing the work". If you're ready to improve your leadership, process and team, find out how I can help you.

1 Comment

  1. Gordon Milne on April 9, 2019 at 9:06 pm

    I’d restore it from a backup?

    However, if you are saying we get a clean slate to move on from where we are today then I would be concerned about no longer having a list of things people contacted us about. Such a list is useful to work out what is broken (i.e. bugs) and what its is that people really want to use the product for. The latter is often the best source of direction for new features. Without it, I’d be a bit lost.

    I am sure we can navel-gaze features into your product. I just wouldn’t be sure if they were just what we wanted and bore little resemblance to what customers actually wanted. It is very easy for product creators to come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas as to what people might want but this is all too often an idea of what they find interesting to work on. It often isn’t what others value.

    So I would then turn to the most seasoned product devs we have on the team and ask them what should come next. Their real-world experience on the product is a good way to decide on what is most likely to be of most customer value.

    So, I’d be a bit lost without that backlog.

    BTW, I am not saying the backlog is the one sole point of truth. It often isn’t but, it has the benefit of having had soem kind of contact with the customer in many cases.



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