Your backlog is lying to you

It promises order but delivers anxiety. It says "we'll get to this eventually" but really means "never." We were drowning in our endless list of "someday" tasks for years until we killed our backlog, and our team finally started shipping what actually mattered.

In this talk, I'll show you what we learned from ditching the traditional backlog in favor of focused work cycles and strategic prioritization. Who could have known that when you stop pretending you'll someday build everything on that list, you can start actually focusing on building the right things, right now.

We swapped time estimates for time budgets. We traded the illusion of planning for actual progress. And we went from accumulating technical debt to actually paying it down.

There were trade-offs and challenges along the way, and I'll candidly share those as well. Whether you're at a scrappy startup or navigating the enterprise, you'll walk away with a new lens on how to move faster without the backlog baggage.

Ready to dump that backlog?