The Unordered Product Backlog
An unordered product backlog can become a trash heap of PBIs that doesn’t give the development team any indication of which items they should work on next. Sprint planning becomes a random grab of what the Scrum team feels is important in that moment. Stakeholders may start lobbying for their pet project, even if those things shouldn’t be the team’s top priority, and the loudest voice may get precedence.
The product owner determines the order of the product backlog. However, some misguided POs do this by assigning priorities to PBIs, which isn’t the same as ordering them, and is an approach that always leads to headaches. For example, Ryan recently worked with a company that was struggling to figure out which product ...
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