This week on FounderQuest the guys weigh in on a recent debate sparked by Jason Fried at Basecamp around the value of backlogs. In short, Fried proports that backlogs cause unnecessary stress and that if an idea will be forgotten about if it isn’t written down, then it probably isn’t important in the first place.
Honeybadger does have a pretty significant backlog and some on the team find it more useful than others. Each of the guys discusses how they deal with the backlog, whether they ignore it, stress out about it, embrace it as a useful part of the business, or actively plot to burn it down and rebuild Honeybadger V2 from the ashes.
Links:
Justin Jackson
Intercom
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Trello
Clubhouse
Jira
GitHub
Jason Fried
Local Editor
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Full Transcript:
Starr: So how was your trip, Ben?
Ben: My trip was good. Yeah. I went down to Mobile, visited my parents for a few days, and I actually went over to Louisiana as well and saw my brother and sister. So, good time. Got a lot of reading in. It's a kind of a long trip and so I got some books done. You know Kindle, makes everything wonderful.
Ben: So yeah. Had a good relaxing few days. Nice little vacation.
Starr: Good. Did you eat some crawfish?
Ben: No, but I did have some fried catfish.
Starr: Okay. That counts.
Ben: Yeah, that counts.
Josh: I love fried catfish.
Starr: Yeah. It's the only way to eat catfish.
Ben: It's been a long time since I had some.
Josh: That is true.
Josh: Do people eat catfish any other way?
Ben: Oh, of course.
Starr: Really?
Ben: It's kind of like Forrest Gump. Boiled shrimp, fried shrimp.
Josh: Oh, yeah, yeah. Boiled catfish, though. I don't know. I think I'll stick with fried.
Ben: Yeah. It's the best way. For sure.
Starr: Yeah. So today we're going to be talking about backlogs. We're kind of late to the party. This was on Twitter a long time ago, and then we all went on vacation.
Josh: A long time ago.
Starr: And then I think we're trying to hit the sort of rebound cycle where everything old becomes new again, and people are sort of into vintage tweets. So yeah. So we're going to talk about this. So could somebody explain to me this whole thing about backlogs and why everybody was talking about it?
Ben: Yeah, I think there was... Well the issue of backlogs is when you have a whole bunch of stuff that you've thought about doing at some point. And so you kind of log it, right? We use get GitHub for that. But you can use whatever like Trello or Clubhouse or something. Basically, any idea that you have, people like to throw those in a big bucket and say, yeah, we'll get to that someday. Right? And so you create this big backlog of work that you want to do, or that you think at some point was worth doing. And the conversation on Twitter was, there was some anxiety about this issue, oh I've got this big backlog and I feel like, oh, I've got all this work to do and I'll never get it all done. And woe is me kind of thing.
Ben: And then someone said, "Oh I'll start a service, I will charge you $10,000 and I'll come in and just delete your backlog, and you'll feel so much better." So we've got a request from Justin. He said, "Yeah, the FounderQuest guys should definitely talk about this." Because opinions, and of course we have opinion. So here we are.
Josh: So remind me, did we hire that guy to come in?
Ben: No. And because my opinion is I like backlogs. We can talk about that.
Starr: Well, can I read the quote? There's a quote and it's sweet, and it's from Jason Fried, who seems like a decent guy. I don't know, I'm not going to go into a big tangent about hero worship and the sort of small bootstrap, whatever. But yeah. So he says, "We don't believe in backlogs. Backlogs and make you feel guilty." So I don't like feeling guilty.
Ben: I would say backlogs give you the opportunity to choose to feel guilty. They don't make you feel guilty. Right? But maybe that's splitting semantic care.
Starr: I like it, it's a very stoic quote from you.
Josh: That's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's like I'm-
Josh: Everything is in your perception, right Ben?
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: Well, I mean, yeah, a backlog can't make me feel a certain way. I'm the owner of my emotions.
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: Right? I say that so much. That's my little mantra throughout the day. It's like I'm the owner of my emotions.
Josh: Yeah, say it through my tears.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: I could see how you might want to say that pretty frequently when you have a three year old in the house.
Starr: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well she is... Ah, I don't know. Maybe I'm the owner of my emotions, but I feel like she's definitely subletting them, to a certain degree. So.
Ben: We could start a new acronym. OME. Owner of My Emotions.
Starr: Oh yeah. And have little yellow wristbands that we sew on.
Ben: There you go.
Starr: Yeah.
Starr: Great idea.
Starr: &n...