One Backlog

One company backlog is focused only on the engineering department. It represents a list of most important initiatives in the engineering department. It‘s focused mostly on product and represents a list of priorities for actual development.

OKRs are a great tool for direction and focus to most important company goals, our top company objectives. They are used across the company, in all company departments. But isn’t it nice when you have your sprint backlog, and you can focus on your daily engineering job? Image if we could have one backlog on engineering level where each team development team could contribute to, and this backlog corresponds to our top company objectives (OKRs). Well guess what, we are working on it!

Our engineering department is organized following the Less methodology. The actual methodology is less important - what is important is business agility. Business agility is the elasticity of the organization to focus on important things, having best people working on most important initiatives.

One backlog should always reflect our company product priorities and our client needs. It is all about having client focus.

The difference is impact

Traditional scrum teams are long lived teams who work on their Sprint backlog. A sprint backlog is usually a queue of tasks for one or more products on which the team has been working on for a long time. But even if you are a top performing individual in a scrum team, does it automatically mean that you have a high impact in your company?

No, unfortunately not.

You could be the best engineer in the best performing team in the company and still not have a deep impact. A typical reason for that is local optimization. You optimize your performance, your team organization and processes, but you don‘t work on important products and initiatives.

This is where one company backlog comes into play. One company backlog is just like any other backlog, a queue of tasks sorted by company priority. The difference between sprint backlogs and one company backlog is in the scope. A sprint backlog is focused on one development team and has a very limited scope while product backlog (RA backlog) is focused on only one product. One company backlog is focused on the whole engineering department, and it reflects company priorities.

How do you build a one company backlog

One company backlog is backlog like any other. It is a list of most important initiatives on engineering level. Since we use Atlassian Jira tool for sprint backlogs, we decided to use the same tool for one company backlog. You could use Microsoft Excel to make one company backlog. As a matter of fact, we actually used Microsoft Excel for the first version of one company backlog .

Since prioritization is the key element of any backlog, we wanted to avoid subjective measurement of item priority in One company backlog. Instead, we focused on understanding criteria for item prioritization. Our approach with One backlog prioritization is based on couple dimensions for establishing priority score. We currently use multiple different dimensions such as market impact, upsell opportunity, level of effort etc. Not all dimensions have the same importance, so that is why we introduced weights for each dimension. The most important dimension is the product and engineering alignment through agreement, as stated in agile principles.

One company backlog is not only about items. What do we do when we hire 30 new engineers? Well, with One company backlog we can understand current company needs and we can plan new resources accordingly. It helps us to close technical competence gap by helping us to understand where should our focus go. The backlog brings transparency to organization. You can understand engineering priorities and goals by simply looking at company backlog.