Eat the Frog - Is Procrastination Ruining Your Backlog?

Getting through a large backlog, building out user stories, prioritizing stories, and getting the backlog organized can be challenging. It's human nature to avoid difficult tasks. That leads to just doing all the easy stuff first and leaving all the problematic things for last. That sounds like a good plan, but leaving all the hard stuff to last means prioritizing capabilities and features based on your customer needs isn't going to be possible.

It's time for your team to eat the Frog.

Eat the Frog is a technique where individuals or teams tackle the most difficult tasks first before moving on to more easy tasks. It's also about prioritizing tasks based on the customer need and not the easiest to complete to provide a robust series of enhancements that your customers need.

When sprint planning, it's easy to slip into the mindset of doing only those things are simple. We find that slightly tweaking that mindset produces better results. Instead of easiest to complete, we ask the question, "What will give us the most business value?" This means we choose things based on business value. Check out our business value article here. https://theuncommonleague.com/global-coaching-questions/2021314/what-is-the-definition-of-business-value-in-agile

We encourage Product Managers and Business Analysts to prioritize stories that are deconstructed to a detailed level and meet the DOR (Definition of Ready). In other words, those stories that the team can easily pull into the next sprint with little discussion and confusion are prioritized higher.

Don't hit the easy stuff. Work on the thoughtfully deconstructed user stories (story splitting), and development can begin more quickly with less effort.