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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

This is what agile is for. You have a backlog of work in priority order and it can change whenever you need it to. If you get an unplanned request, instead of saying "yes" or "no" go review the backlog and see where it fits. It's a true existential threat to the business, it can go straight to the top. If it's just a thing they want, it can go in with the things everyone else wants. If the ask is incomplete, you work on completing the ask before asking a developer to look at it.

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backlog sounds like "not today" bucket but in reality backlog is "never" bucket

Agile is great in theory, expects perfectly functional rational organisations without an internal political tug of war. Which us why agile almost never works well in practice in BigCos.

In scrum "backlog" is "look at it once a month and decide what you will work on". In kanban, "backlog" is "the list of potential next actions".

In none of them it's a "never" bucket, mostly because it's the only bucket you have.

Anyway, both of those explicitly don't have the possibility of stopping whatever you are doing right now. The agile methodologies (always remember that Agile says you shouldn't put too much stake in methodologies) have plenty of flaws, but this isn't one of them.

I find it's built exactly for office politics. Because the backlog can be shared with stakeholders everyone can see what work is in the queue and in what order. The only thing a team lead needs to stand firm on is capacity.

And with this approach, your backlog grows to be an icebox where tickets go to die.

Naturally, as if you are able to deprioritize something long enough it shouldn't be done.

That's good. A lot of people will come to you with ultimately low business value asks. It's just how it is. People have ideas, they want to briefly discuss it, I direct it to the backlog. If the EM and the Product Owner both consider it low-value, the requestor has to accept that fate or create a more compelling argument for why the assessment was incorrect. But most requestors won't put in the work to justifying the requests. There is no problem with backlogs becoming graveyards. We might revisit the item later if business priorities change yet again, and now we have a paper trail of the decisions.

If the backlog keeps growing either the tickets aren't important or you need to grow your capacity through additional headcount or vendors. As a manager it's your job to communicate the implications of both.

If they never outrank new requests then yes. If you're backlog grows and grows consistently then that's a signal to hire more people.

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