YDS: Can You Have Too Many Product Backlog Items?

Can you have too many Product Backlog Items? This comes up in our Product Owner class quite a bit. The short answer is: YES! But there are some ideas that we need to explore so that your Product Backlog is well understood and actionable.

Watch as Todd and Ryan break down this situation and expose many of the common reasons that Product Backlogs get out of control and how you can refine your Product Backlog into a transparent future vision of your Product. Want to learn more about Scrum?

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[edwardlowe]

Our backlog currently has 160 items and the oldest item is 45 weeks old. We try a weekly cull but actually have an archive board we dump them in rather than deleting - this helps the PM get over the desire not to delete, but is rarely checked! Thank you for the tip of considering time rather than total number. The 3 month heuristic is useful!

[SonjaL]

476 PBIs, oldest from 2017. I need to get on to deleting some of that junk ^^.

[mikewilliams]

JIRA reports 1293 items on the backlog currently. The oldest is dated October '98 but has a comment in it from last year. This is a product with a loooong history (late 80s) and we are now on our 4th work tracking system, migrating current and historic entries as we go. We are winding up for a second scrum transformation, rolling out training this time, so interesting times ahead.

[mrscrankydino]

1, 249 items in the entire backlog right now. The oldest item is almost 7 years. Implementing scrum processes and practices in my dev group has been extremely difficult and I'm trying to work little by little to get everything more streamlined. Changing work habits and attitudes has proven the toughest part, although I'm pretty proud of the progress we've made as far as participating in the various scrum ceremonies and having detailed definitions of done, proper estimating, and agreements on sprint size and the work items that will be in them. I guess the question I have as far as backlog items go -- a lot of the things that have hung around and not been worked on, are things we eventually, as a team, do want to see in the product, but just haven't had time to do for various reasons (more important asks from our sales team or partners, blockers, dev resources getting pulled for various things, etc) -- should we still just delete that intel? Also note, I'm not the product owner so I can't just go rogue and start deleting things :)

[crjones]

175 items currently on the backlog and the oldest item is 1.5 years.