I have 94 games in my Steam library.
I’ve finished 6.
The other 88 just sit there. Staring at me. With that little completion percentage showing under each title, “2%, last session: 4 years ago”, which somehow manages to make me feel guilty on a Tuesday morning between two coffees.
Then one day I opened Jira, and got exactly the same feeling.
A backlog is not a to-do list. It’s a museum.
A museum of every good idea you had, that others had, that someone had on a Friday at 5:45pm right before the weekend. Every ticket is an intention. A hope. A “we really should do this someday”.
The problem is that “someday” is not a sprint.
I’ve seen backlogs with 600 tickets. Backlogs going back to 2018. User stories written by people who left the company long ago, for features nobody was asking for anymore, on user journeys that had been redesigned three times since.
Those tickets were still there. Alive. Priority “Medium”. Waiting for their turn.
Like FIFA 21 in my Steam library. Still shrink-wrapped.
Grooming your backlog isn’t glamorous. It’s essential.
Backlog refinement is one of those things everyone knows matters and nobody enjoys doing. It’s the dishes of agile work, necessary, thankless, and it comes back around next week.
But an untended backlog is debt. Not technical debt. Cognitive debt. Every vague ticket sitting there is a micro-doubt piling up. A decision that wasn’t made. A conversation that never happened.
And at sprint planning, you pay for it.
What I’ve learned from managing projects : the best teams aren’t the ones that ship the most. They’re the ones who know what not to do. Who look a ticket in the eye and say “no, archive it, move on” without spending 40 minutes justifying the call.
Closing a ticket without shipping it is a skill. A real one.
The real problem is guilt.
We keep tickets the same way we keep games. On principle. Because someone paid for it. Because “it might come in handy”. Because someone senior still vaguely cares about it.
But a backlog that only grows is a signal. Not of failure, of volume. Too many entries, not enough exits. And at some point the team stops trusting the list because the list no longer reflects reality.
Reality is three things that actually matter this quarter. Not 600.
The cognitive overhead of an unmanageable backlog costs far more than the time it takes to clean it up. High-performing teams know this.
So here’s what I suggest.
Open your backlog. Filter everything that hasn’t been touched in six months. Look at each ticket. Ask one question : if we never do this, will anyone notice ?
If the answer is no, archive it. No ceremony. No 45-minute meeting to discuss it.
And those 88 Steam games ? Same deal. Stray looks great but honestly, you’re not going to play it.
Your backlog will thank you. Your team will too.
Your Steam library doesn’t care. It’s used to it.