A neat tool to bridge the gap between Product & Engineering: Combined Backlog

I came across this picture as I was browsing my consulting data archives. In one of my engagements, there was growing tension and trust issues between product and engineering teams. This is not unusual when these disciplines sit across different lines of business, or do not fall under a single leader. Often there is not enough transparency and sharing, or not enough mutual cooperation going on. 

Engineering/IT generally are not great at sharing the true nature of their technical challenges, architectural issues or simply, the state of technical debt. Even if there isn't much technical debt, engineering leaders and CTOs are responsible for owning a technology roadmap, usually the platform strategy roadmap which creates enough runway for future innovation. The situation is that the work needed to service both the Technology as well as the Product roadmaps, usually needs to be done by the same group of people - "same resources" - running into capacity conflicts, that drives escalation problems. Focus too much on technical streams, you starve the business / product / customer delivery. Focus on too much product features, you run the risk of crippling the technology stack through lack of innovation, foundational architecture thus creating too much technical debt. Healthy tension should exist - but - hope is not a good strategy. More often than not, introducing a simple mechanism of co-operative planning is a good way of building trust through disciplined execution.

As way to bridge this gap, a common solution is to meet half-way, creating a single backlog that combines both Product & Technical backlog items into a single shared Combined Master Backlog. Along with this, create simple mechanisms for managing the backlog with a regular cadence, and as a team, agree on some common terminology, e.g. understanding the status of a backlog item.