“Feature backlogs. Every product attracts new feature ideas, and you can’t implement ideas as fast as you can think them up, so you write them down, and this list is called the feature backlog. A lot of the ideas on the backlog are bad ideas, and you merely wrote them down to avoid hurting the feelings of the people who thought them up. Backlogs make everyone feel good.

The trouble is that 90% of the things in the feature backlog will never get implemented, ever. So every minute you spent writing down, designing, thinking about, or discussing features that are never going to get implemented is just time wasted. When I hear about product teams that regularly have “backlog grooming” sessions, in which they carefully waste a tiny amount of time and mental energy every day or every week thinking about every single feature which will never be implemented, I want to poke my eyes out.

Suggestion: Do not allow more than a month or two of work to get into the feature backlog list. Once the backlog is full, do not allow new items to be added unless you remove an item. Do not spend any time speccing, designing, or talking about backlog items: the backlog, in fact, should be seen as a list of things you are not allowed to talk about or work on.”

This was written in 2012 and is still so good. Worth coming back to every few months to force some self-examination.