Throw Out Your Backlog

Every ecommerce operation we’ve worked with has one thing in common - more desired improvements to their website and technology stack than can be physically implemented at once. That’s why most companies maintain a backlog - a list of projects, tasks and ideas that they would like to implement in the future.

As a phase or sprint of work is completed the backlog is reviewed and the next set of improvements to implement are selected from the backlog. This keeps things moving forward in an orderly, consistent manner and is considered a best practice not just for ecommerce projects but for all software projects.

That’s why Buffer’s recent article titled “We Took a Week Off to Build Features That Weren’t on Our Roadmap” is so interesting - they dropped all of the regularly scheduled work from their backlog and roadmap to spend a week focusing their entire team on building new ideas that they brainstormed and voted on that week. If you’re familiar with ShipIt Day at Atlassian or other corporate hackathons that other brands do, this is a similar concept, but instead of it being for a day or two it was a week of work where everyone had to drop their regular backlog-focused ideas.

Ecommerce brands could benefit from this - we have seen some companies that have backlogs so large that ideas have been stuck in them for years and may no longer be relevant, or might be the next big thing to unlock explosive growth but have been forgotten.

By spending a week (or two, if you use two week sprints) disregarding your backlog or roadmap and instead focusing on ideas brainstormed that week (instead of backlog items that may have been designed months ago), you can capture changes in your industry, ecommerce and consumer expectations much faster than your competitors. Consider it a moment away from your long-term plans to quickly leapfrog the competition.