The backlog had 847 items.
Some were years old. Feature requests from customers who'd since churned. Bug reports for edge cases nobody had seen again. Ideas from brainstorms that everyone had forgotten. Each one had seemed important enough to write down at the time.
Nobody was ever going to do most of them.
This was understood but never said. The backlog existed as a kind of organisational guilt — a record of all the things we should do but wouldn't. Every few months, someone would suggest "grooming" it, and we'd spend an afternoon closing the most obviously obsolete items. The number would drop to 600, then slowly climb back up.
The backlog wasn't a plan. It was a graveyard.
I've seen this at every company I've worked at. The backlog starts as a useful tool — a place to capture ideas so they don't get lost. But it grows faster than it shrinks, and eventually it becomes a burden. Searching it takes time. Maintaining it takes time. Feeling bad about it takes time.
The problem is that adding to the backlog is easy, and removing from it is hard. Adding feels productive. You've captured something. You've acknowledged a need. Removing feels like giving up. You're admitting that this thing, which someone once cared about, will never happen.
So the backlog grows, and everyone quietly accepts that most of it is fiction.
Some teams have tried to fix this with process. Automatic expiration of old tickets. Regular culling sessions. Limits on how many items can exist. These help, but they're treating the symptom, not the cause.
The cause is that we're afraid to say no. We're afraid to tell someone that their idea isn't going to happen. We're afraid to admit that we can't do everything. So we say "we'll add it to the backlog," which sounds like yes but means no.
The honest thing would be to say no directly. "That's a good idea, but we're not going to do it." It's uncomfortable, but it's clear. It doesn't create false hope. It doesn't add to the pile of things we're pretending to care about.
Eventually, we declared backlog bankruptcy. We archived everything older than six months and started fresh. It felt reckless. It felt irresponsible. It felt like we were throwing away important information.
Nothing bad happened. The important things came back, because they were still important. The unimportant things stayed gone, because nobody missed them.
The backlog is smaller now. It might grow again. But at least, for the moment, it contains things we might actually do.