Backlog as a Crime Scene
- Darren Emery
- May 19
- 5 min read
Uncovering Organisational Dysfunction
Step quietly into the average digital programme and inspect the backlog. Don’t touch anything. Just observe. What do you see?
Hundreds of entries - some relics from a bygone roadmap, others freshly logged in response to last week’s executive panic - slowly decaying in Jira or languishing in an Excel tab named “Master_Backlog_FINAL_v6”.
Five different epics are marked ‘Urgent’ -each one louder than the last. One feature has seventeen variations, all named differently. Several items are tagged ‘icebox’ - as if strategy improves with cold storage. A comment thread on ticket #849 reveals a polite but increasingly frantic debate about what “MVP” was supposed to mean. Ticket #9267 is just titled “Quick Win (???)”.
This isn’t a product backlog.
It’s a crime scene. The body? Strategic intent.
And like any good investigator, we’re not here to admire the chaos. We’re here to learn from it. Because your backlog - if you know how to read it - is a diagnostic tool. It tells a story. Not about what your teams plan to do, but about who you are, how you work, and what you’re afraid of.
Backlogs aren’t just operational artefacts. They’re cultural mirrors. If you want to understand an organisation’s fears, misalignments, and blind spots, you should start with its backlog.
Let’s take a walk through the evidence.
Exhibit A: The Where Work Goes to Wait Backlog
A classic case. The backlog contains 3,200 items. No one has touched most of them in a year. Some pre-date the current CTO. Several pre-date Agile. There are more "nice-to-haves" than actual business needs, and the top of the backlog changes weekly based on who shouted loudest in the last meeting.
This is not a roadmap. It’s a dumping ground for decisions no one was willing to make.
Bloated backlogs are often seen as a resourcing problem: “We just need more teams to get through the work.” In truth, they’re a thinking problem. A fat backlog suggests strategic ambiguity. When you’re not clear on what matters, everything gets kept - just in case.
What does this tell us about the organisation?
Decisions are being deferred, not made.
There’s likely no strategy filter. If there is one, it’s either unclear, unused, or constantly changing.
Prioritisation is being done at the wrong level, probably by the wrong people.
And here’s the kicker: the longer you leave it, the harder it is to clean up. At some point, the effort to triage the backlog outweighs the value of what’s inside it. This is how organisations end up doing a full “backlog archive” and declaring it a transformation.
It’s not transformation. It’s corporate denial with version control.
Exhibit B: The Cover-Your-Back-log
Another telltale scene. Items in the backlog have titles like:
“As a user, I want something that will fix that thing I told you about.”
“Urgent bugfix from marketing (ask Sarah).”
“Refactor the refactor.”
“Stakeholder wants this but we’re not sure why.”
This isn’t a product backlog. It’s an emotional dumping ground.
Here, the backlog reveals something deeper: a lack of trust in the organisation. Teams are using Jira as a form of legal documentation. “Put it in the backlog” becomes a safety mechanism. It’s the equivalent of BCCing your manager - just in case.
In cultures like this, the backlog becomes a hedge against blame. Every ticket hedges its bets with ambiguity. People write down vague user stories to protect themselves from being wrong. No one closes a ticket because no one wants to be responsible for killing something that “might be important.”
Trust isn’t a soft word here. It’s the bedrock of decision-making. If your backlog reads like a risk register wrapped in a therapy session, it means your teams are afraid to think clearly and act decisively.
Exhibit C: The Frankenlog
This backlog is stitched together from multiple sources: a bit of product strategy, some architecture clean-up, quarterly OKRs, support requests, executive mandates, and one epic called “Quick Wins” that’s been growing since 2020.
It’s a monster. Built with good intentions. Alive in all the wrong ways.
The Frankenlog is a hallmark of siloed thinking. Each team contributes their view of the world, but no one curates the whole. There’s no coherent narrative from top to bottom: it’s not a strategy - it’s a collage of competing perspectives with no editor.
What it tells us:
There’s no unifying product strategy.
Work intake is decentralised but ungoverned.
Delivery is reactive, because the system itself is incoherent.
You don’t fix a Frankenlog with grooming. You fix it with intent. That means re-establishing a shared language for value, a single point of clarity about purpose, and a strong filter for what belongs in the product flow at all.
And yes, it may also require deleting 80% of what’s in there.
Exhibit D: The Zombie Backlog
These tickets aren’t technically alive - but no one’s had the courage to kill them. They're just… there. Shuffling along, not blocking anything, but not moving forward either. Tickets marked “Blocked” or “Dependency” from two quarters ago. Tickets that say “wait until after Phase 3” but Phase 3 finished last year. Or worse: tickets that were delivered but never closed.
This backlog tells us the system has no exit strategy. Work goes in, but rarely comes out. Decisions are made, but not recorded. Outcomes are declared, but not reflected. It’s like a bad meeting - no actions, no follow-up, no memory.
The Zombie Backlog is the result of process without ownership. Nobody owns the backlog, so no one feels responsible for curating it. And without curation, rot sets in fast. Not just in the backlog, but in the culture.
Because once the backlog stops reflecting reality, people stop trusting it. And once people stop trusting it, they stop using it. And now you’re flying blind.
The Strategy Filter (or Lack Thereof)
A healthy backlog is a side effect of strategic clarity.
In organisations where strategy is understood as a clear, integrated set of choices - what we will do, what we won’t do, and how we’ll win - the backlog reflects that. There’s a throughline from intent to initiative to delivery. Items are curated ruthlessly. Prioritisation is painful, but principled.
When strategy avoids hard choices and trade-offs, the backlog becomes the overflow bucket for every ‘good idea’. And when everything’s possible, nothing gets done.
So if your backlog looks like a landfill, it’s not because you’re bad at grooming. It’s because you’re bad at choosing.
Diagnosing from the Backlog
Want to know how an organisation really works? Don’t look at their mission statement. Look at their backlog.
Look at how it’s curated. Who touches it. What makes it in. What doesn’t. What gets closed. What lingers. Look at how often it’s cleaned. Look at how often it’s ignored.
Because the backlog is where strategy meets reality. It’s where culture leaks into process. And it’s where fear, indecision, and misalignment go to hide.
Closing the Case
The good news? You don’t have to live with a criminally bad backlog. But you do have to be willing to treat it not as a list of tasks, but as a window into how your organisation thinks, acts, and decides.
Start with a cleanse. Not a grooming session - a forensic audit.
Archive anything older than a year. Kill the zombies. Identify duplicate or vague items. Cluster by intent, not category. Reconnect to strategic goals. Assign clear ownership. And above all, make peace with the fact that 80% of what you’re holding onto is noise.
Remember: your backlog is not your product. Your backlog is not your strategy. Your backlog is just the trail of breadcrumbs your organisation leaves behind as it tries to make sense of what to do next.
If that trail looks like a crime scene, it’s time to call in a new detective.
