Backlog

The ordered list of work a team intends to do but has not started, ranked by priority.

What it tells you about a developer

Backlog fluency signals product-minded engineering: the developer thinks about what is worth building next, which is the shape of a future tech lead. Someone with this fluency can usually walk through how their team decided what came off the backlog and why.

Everything a team might build waits in the backlog until it is pulled into a sprint. Items near the top are refined and imminent. Items near the bottom may never happen. 'It's in the backlog' often works as a polite deferral.

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