Delete Things That You’ll Never Do

There was a time when I took over 2 JIRA boards, one of them had over 1000 open tickets. The previous Product Managers let everyone add tickets to it and never bothered to prioritize it because everything was important and it had to be kept there as per cross-functional team’s requests. It took me over a month to prioritize, clear and delete it to a manageable shape.

• Often, if you are in a similar situation where your JIRA project might become the dumping ground for people to create tickets, bugs, feature requests. These could come from sales, marketing, support, customer success, project managers.
• You need to create a process to look through the new tickets, maybe even modifying the JIRA workflow can help you achieve that. You can add a triage step to the workflow so any new tickets added by people other than the board OWNER will be added to this step and it will give you a chance to review/delete them before they get added to the backlog.
• As much as everyone feels they need to create the ticket and you should keep it there for tracking purposes if you feel that a particular ticket will never make it to development. It is better to DELETE it!

Keep items you aren’t ready, off the product backlog

• Create a different JIRA project or Trello board to keep track of your feature requests that are still valid.
• Keep track of them in a format such as below, where you can manage them easily in different buckets.
• You could add the metric a particular feature request affects so you can easily filter through. Ex: Customer acquisition, retention, referral, etc. Tracking the number of times a particular feature was requested also helps you prioritize. In Jira, you can also add tags for customers who requested it.
• Make the development team a fundamental part of the backlog prioritization process. Include backlog grooming sessions with the team once in a few weeks or a month.

Would love to hear feedback if the article has helped. Connect with me LinkedIn if you want to chat further.