AI enablement
Turning a quality backlog into a scored queue
Backlog worked by impact, not by age
The problem
A quality backlog had grown for years. Issues were worked roughly in the order they were filed, which meant old, low impact issues sometimes got attention before new, high impact ones.
The approach
The team defined a small set of signals, how many users were affected, how often, and how severe the failure was, and combined them into a single score. The backlog was re-sorted by that score instead of by filing date.
The reusable idea
"Oldest first" feels fair, but it is a scheduling policy, not a prioritization strategy. A simple, transparent score usually beats an ungrounded sense of what feels urgent.