I want to point out a paradox you may not have noticed.

A team of software engineers or SREs invariably has more good ideas than time. We know this very well. Pick any system we own, and we’ll come up with a list of 10 things we could do to make it better. Off the top of our head.

On the other hand, when our team is confronted with the opportunity to purge some old features or enhancements out of the backlog, there’s resistance. We say, “we might get around to this some day,” or “this still needs to get done.”

These two beliefs, taken together, reveal a deep lack of team self-confidence.

If our team always has more good ideas than time, then we’re never going to implement all the good ideas in our backlog. If we add more people, we’ll just get more good ideas, and the backlog will just get more bloated.

Why are we reluctant to ruthlessly remove old tickets, then? We know that we’re constantly generating good ideas. In fact, the ideas we’re generating today are necessarily (on average) better than most of the ideas in the backlog:

1. We have more information about the system now then we used to, so our new ideas are more aligned with real-world facts, and
2. We have more experience as engineers now, so we have developed better intuition about what kind of interventions will create the most value.

Seen in this light, a hesitance to let go of old ideas is revealed as a symptom of a deep pathology. It means we don’t believe in our own creativity and agency. If we did, we would have easy answers to the questions we always ask when we consider closing old tickets:

• What if we forget about this idea? That’s okay. We’ll have plenty of other, better, more relevant ideas. We never stop generating them.
• What if this problem gets worse over time? If the risk is enough that we should prioritize this ticket over our other work, then let’s do that now. Otherwise, we can cross that bridge if we ever get to it.
• Will the reporter of this ticket even let us close it? Nobody owns our backlog but us. When we decide to close a ticket, all we owe the reporter is an honest explanation of why.

Leave behind the paradox of the bloated backlog and start believing in your team’s own agency and creativity. Hell, maybe even cap your backlog. A team with faith in its competence is a team unleashed.