alt Hacker NewsSubmarine article.
Also, back when I was still a PM I found most these kinds of tools to be a waste of time. Tools don't solve ownership.
I found just talking directly with my sellers and engineers in the same room would solve these backlog issues.
Every project, initiative, and task needed to be directly tied to enhancing customer satisfaction or tangibly driving revenue (1-2% of ARR).
If Eng could not justify why a refactor could help customer satisfaction or topline P/L, I'd deprioritize it. If sales could not justify why a checkbox feature would satisfy the majority of our customers or help our topline P/L, I'd deprioritize it and re-prioritize the refactor.
Just demand fucking ownership from everyone - PM, Sales, and Engineering - and complex projects can be easily executed.
Ownership also means trusting the people executing but also validating - I trusted my engineers, salespeople, and stakeholders and vice versa, but I always made sure to do my homework.
Backlogs will always expand - that's to be expected - but someone must groom them and own them. That's on the PM.
Who cares what tool you use - it could be JIRA or a Excel 95 spreadsheet. Just own shit and fucking execute.
Replies
A quick way to lose your engineers’ trust is to claim you “trust your engineers” and then unilaterally deprioritize an engineering task.
Not saying there aren’t clueless or myopic engineers, just that you should be honest about the relationship. (And find better engineers or better product managers, whichever is needed.)
So if your code is spaghetti and that makes it impossible to add new features (happens easy, especially if you let an LLM loose on it), the refactoring to fix it would never happen and the engineers who stay or are willing to be hired will just be those clueless enough not to know they won’t be able to achieve anything.