Two years ago, we launched a project called sliplane.io. It's a hosting service for containerized apps that makes deployments ridiculously easy and affordable.
Resonance has been really good and as we've been growing, customers have been submitting lot's of new feature requests. On top we have our own ideas and vision where we want to take the company.
Pretty soon we found ourselves in a situation of a constantly growing backlog which can be a pain to manage.
Not only is it very frustrating because it feels like you make negative progress, it also becomes harder and harder to prioritize tickets and keep track of duplicates or outdated issues. Old but important tickets quickly move to page 4 on the issues tab and get buried in trash.
We needed a solution to stay ahead of this without important tickets falling through the cracks.
The solution:
We abandoned the backlog.
Our backlog was a repo where we quickly wrote down all ideas, bug reports and features requests. The plan was to come back to it periodically to prioritize a few issues, refine them and then derive actionable tickets in the frontend or backend repo.
First problem:
A lot of undefined stuff ended up in our backlog. I used it as my notepad and just dumped every thought I had in there. I did it out of fear of forgetting something.
We both knew, the issues in the repo were full of unspecified crap or stuff that was way in the future or super complicated or just not important. So as a consequence we very rarely came back here to have a look.
Second problem:
The status was never up to date.
Surprise:
It requires time and energy to keep the board up to date.
Things were moving fast so there was a lot of stuff to update.
In the beginning I tried to keep up with it, commented like crazy on the issues and moved stuff from in progress to blocked and back.
I ran after my co founder and started asking him about progress only to hear: "Not done yet, but look at this awesome new stuff I built!" - It was awesome! But it also made me nervous.
Are we slowly getting of track here?
Maybe this is procrastination...
I talked to him and learned an important lesson:
People do things differently.
Doing these little side quests was his way of keeping the fun alive and motivation high. He always came back to the tickets and eventually finished them. So it was really just an issue of trust and treating him like an adult.
Its impressive how quickly you can blow up project management tasks and spend all your time with it. Running after people, moving tickets from left to right, discussions about how to name the columns.
Working with people who simply act on their responsibilities and staying out of their way probably cuts project management time by 95%.
We already worked effectively together before we introduced a Kanban board. And dragging that responsibility with us, did more harm than good. So we quietly abandoned it. Small bugs get fixed immediately or in between. Every couple of weeks we discuss 3-5 important next features and work on them until they are either finished or we are reprioritizing. Apart from these important next steps, we keep our own separate ToDo lists. No recurring meetings. We keep ourselves updated through chat.
Does it work forever? Certainly not. But it does right now and it allows us to spend way more time coding and move fast.
Top comments (1)
its me, the adult who builds random shit all the time