Wish List in Overdrive

How to make your backlog profitable all by itself.

It was my first job as a Scrum Master, and to be honest, I’ve never witnessed a Product Owner work the backlog like I’ve seen then. The backlog wasn’t just a tool to organize and prioritize, it became a money-making tool for the organization.

When I joined this small company as a full-stack developer, their main product was an online marketing tool. Every six months, we went live with a new version for all its thirty-five thousand users. It was always a nerve-wracking period before going live, and an exhausting three weeks afterward to fix the tsunami of bugs flowing in.

After having done this for a couple of years, the senior architect, one of the two directors, and I got together and agreed there had to be a better way to do this trick. We stumbled upon these things called “Agile” and “Scrum” and decided to go for it. I became the first de facto Scrum Master and we started our Sprints.

In the beginning, we did Sprints of no less than six weeks, I kid you not. But that rapidly changed to four, and then to two weeks. After a couple of months, we were pumping out whole new versions of the platform every two weeks for the entire user base of 35+k users to enjoy. We didn’t sweat the releases anymore, and frankly, we hardly noticed them.