Product 101: Eliminate Churn with a Healthy Backlog
Hint... This is your bread and butter as the Product Manager
In product development, churn == indecision. Analysis paralysis (gross). Endless strategy debates. Reopened tickets. Lack of Priorities. Zero traceability. Momentum stalls out. As a product manager, your antidote is to maintain a healthy backlog. This is your bread and butter.
TL;DR
Churn is the result of indecision. Indecision stems from ambiguity. Ambiguity lives in your backlog.
When churn creeps in, start by diagnosing the health of your backlog.
A healthy backlog enables execution, reduces risk, and keeps teams aligned.
As the PM, owning the health of the backlog means driving clarity, context, prioritization, and confidence in what the team will build next.
User stories must meet a high bar. Use framework (e.g. INVEST) to evaluate if your user stories are meet the “Definition of Ready”
The Anatomy of Churn
Churn looks like endless meetings to clarify scope. Engineers bouncing between tasks. Reopened tickets. Deliverables that miss the mark. “We’re working hard, but nothing’s moving” becomes the mood of the team. Progress slows. Morale drops. Decisions get revisited, again and again.
Churn happens when teams can't make decisions. Not because they're incapable, but because the data is murky and broken. Tasks are vague. Priorities are unclear. Stakeholders disagree. The backlog—meant to be a source of direction—becomes a source of friction.
Churn is the equivalent of “analysis paralysis.” And while engineering teams bear the brunt of this disarray, the root cause is upstream. The problem is an unhealthy backlog. As the product manager, this is your responsibility. It's your product. Your backlog. Your churn to eliminate.
Example: Amazon’s Decision-Making Mechanisms
The underlying pattern for churn is always the same: a failure to decide and act. Decisions aren’t being made because the inputs to decision-making—what to build, why it matters, how to know it’s done—are broken or missing. When backlog items are poorly defined, disconnected from customer value, or unprioritized, they introduce ambiguity and hesitation leading to churn.
At Amazon, the goal is to be bias for action and move fast. This means baking decision-making mechanisms into the culture. Examples of these mechanisms include:
1-way and 2-way doors: Know when a decision is reversible (2-way) vs. irreversible (1-way). Individuals and teams should be empowered to execute 2-way door decisions all day long without repercussions.
Disagree and commit: Align even when you don’t fully agree. The beauty is you make a decision and move forward.1
Tenets: These eliminate debate, align direction, and introduce a “tie-breaker”.
70% rule: When you have 70% of the data, make a decision and go!
STL/STO: Single-threaded Owner/Single-threaded Leader. Empowering an individual to make tie-breaking decisions across a product or program can unblock teams and keep momentum going.
These mechanisms are not exclusive to Amazon. You can build your own version. But understand that your backlog plays a critical role in enabling fast, confident decisions. As the PM, your countermeasure to churn is a healthy backlog.
Backlog Ownership
Product managers can confuse their job with the daily grind of engineering execution and embedding into scrum ceremonies. While it’s tempting to get in the weeds, you’re not responsible for every task in the sprint. You don’t earn trust by micromanaging the “how,” but by providing clear, prioritized “whats” and “whys.”
Your highest leverage isn’t refining individual tickets, it’s shaping the features, epics, and stories that steer the roadmap. Your job is to look up and out. Own the stack rank of features, epics, and user journeys that make up the roadmap. Your backlog is the connective tissue between long-term vision and short-term execution
The closer an item is to the current sprint, the more detailed and squared away your backlog should be. If you’re three months out, you’re framing customer pain points, epics, and user stories. If you’re three days out, those stories should already be refined, scoped, testable, prioritized, and signed off by engineering.
When engineering teams enter sprint planning, your backlog should be squared away. The stories require no additional meetings to decode intent. Engineers should be able to pull down stories with full context, understanding what to build and why it matters. The backlog should create flow, not friction.
The Engineer's Experience
Engineers are your customers too. An unhealthy backlog is anxiety inducing for engineering teams. Engineers don’t want to chase down context. They don’t want to debate priorities mid-sprint. They want clarity, focus, and a shot at building something that matters. When the backlog is thin, vague, or filled with low-impact work, it creates anxiety. What’s next? Who decides? Why are we doing this?
Engineers thrive when they know what’s next. They understand why the thing they’re building is a priority. They trust that the precious dev cycles used to build the feature connect to the bigger picture and will have an impact. As a PM, your job is to make the next right thing obvious.
This isn’t just about productivity. It’s about respect. A clear backlog signals you value their time and talent.
The Measure of a PM: Backlog Health
The backlog isn’t just a necessary evil, it’s how you bridge the gap between strategy and execution. It’s where tradeoffs are made. Where big bets live and die. Where teams obsess over customer pain points and focus on delivering solutions to solve them.
If you can't explain what’s in your backlog, you don’t own your product. You should be able to walk into any team meeting and articulate:
What problems the team is solving
Why those problems matter
How each story fits into the customer journey
What impact you expect to deliver
A healthy backlog has six traits:
Prioritized – Items are clearly stack-ranked. Items are ordered based on factors like impact, cost of delay, severity, not just gut feel.
What and Why – Each item articulates what needs to be built and why it matters to the customer and business.
Customer Obsessed - Every story starts with the customer in mind and is tied to a broader customer journey.
Traceability - Clearly shows the link between tasks, work, and stories to user journeys and business outcomes.
Testable - User stories are broken down into clear, testable units
Data-driven - Each story has inputs that are data-driven, based on hypothesis, assumptions validated and have outputs that directly impact goals and metrics.
You can evaluate if user stories in your backlog meet the bar through various methods. One of them is INVEST:
Independent – No hidden dependencies
Negotiable – Designed for refinement
Valuable – Has direct user or business impact
Estimable – Can be scoped
Small – Fits within a sprint
Testable – Has clear acceptance criteria
Signs of Unhealthy Backlogs
Backlog deterioration is a subtle, slow burner. A clear sign that its off the rails is when meetings start to multiply. Other indicators are when priorities shift day-to-day or mid-sprint, team morale dips, or lead times increase. Worst case, teams build something no one uses or wants (aka Shelfware).
Final Takeaway
Churn is the result of indecision. Indecision stems from ambiguity. Ambiguity lives in your backlog. You don't owe the team velocity. You owe them clarity. If you're feeling churn, start with the backlog. That's your bread and butter.
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