Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

The idea behind the Backlog is that it should have everything that could possibly be included in the product. You’re never going to actually build it all, but you want a list of everything that could be included in that product vision. The key, though, is what you decide to do first. The questions you need to ask are: what are the items that have the biggest business impact, that are most important to the customer, that can make the most money, and are the easiest to do? You have to realize that there are a whole bunch of things on that list that you will never get to, but you want to get to the things that deliver the most value with the lowest risk first. With Scrum’s incremental development and delivery, you want to begin with the things that will immediately create revenue, effectively “de-risking” the project.