How to prioritize your 700 ticket backlog

“I just took over the platform team of my service. I looked at the ticket backlog, there are more than 700 tickets! Where do I start?”, a new SDM asked me. We were in an adhoc mentoring session I often ran these days when I was not buried in my real job.

“Well, just delete all of them. The important ones will show up again.” I laughed. “You can’t prioritize 700 things, nobody can. But you can prioritize 3 things.”

“What do you mean?”, the SDM was puzzled.

“Can you name the top 3 pains of your customers and team members?” I asked.

“You mean feature requests or operational issues?” The SDM was lost.

“It does not matter. Maybe it is a missing feature in your platform that drives your customers nuts; maybe it is a recurring operational issue that keeps paging your oncall every night. Just measure by their pain level and come up the top 3.” I said.

“I guess I can …” the SDM was intrigued.

“Now pick 1 thing out of the 3, that you can really make a difference. The ONE thing that if you address the pain, stakeholders will be delighted.” I continued, “Don’t try to solve the ONE thing completely, that would be too hard. Try to solve the 80% use cases of that one thing. If your stakeholders are truly delighted, maybe you can solve another 80% of the rest 20%, use the 80/20 rule to guide your incremental milestones until it is not a pain anymore. Then pick the next ONE thing.

In KMS, we put the tickets belonging to the top 3 pains into our daily Slack reminder. We focused on the No.1 pain customers complained the most. We first identified the low hanging fruit use case we could address immediately, then we worked out a plan to tackle the more complex use cases. We made sure we collected feedbacks from AWS support how the improvements made customers’s life better. After 2 years we actually completely offloaded the ticket processing to AWS support’s Subject Matter Experts (SME) through automated tools, so customers could get responses faster. Our oncall doesn’t even see these tickets anymore!”

“Ha, I see, one thing at a time and incremental improvements!” the SDM’s eyes started shining.

“Right, one thing at a time, out of 3 top pains. And remember the 80/20 rule, solve 80% of the one thing incrementally.”, I concluded, “See you next time.”

https://youtu.be/vbSZfuu9v48