Five Quick Tips to Improve your PO Schedule

Being a Product Owner means you’re busy. Meetings with the team, stakeholders, managing your backlog, creating user stories, and iterating your way to creating value for your customers. It can be a lot. It can feel like your calendar is taking you over. Like you are a slave to the clock.

With these five simple tips, your day could be more open and your backlog could be emptier. On top of that, a clear head means more room for you to think about ways to create more value for your customers.

#1 — Delete One Product Backlog Item

Just one. It won’t hurt, I promise.

Treating your backlog as a place where customer wishes go to die is a way to decrease transparency and faith in your backlog from outsiders. It tells them anything could be on there, that it doesn’t mean anything. It can also be a source of repeating status updates:

“When will you be getting to my item?”

“I’m down from 74 to 97 on the backlog, why?”

Fair questions, that wouldn’t be much of an issue with a small, relevant backlog.

Start by deleting one item. Pick an item that was requested by a single person or entity, but is widely regarded as valueless. After you’ve deleted the item, wait a while. Maybe a…