Overview

The Managing Large Backlogs course joins our self-paced learning catalog! This class tackles one of the most common challenges faced by Agile teams: managing large backlogs. Traditional methods of prioritization can be time-consuming, stressful, and often rely on guesswork. In this course, you'll learn a fast, lightweight, and powerful approach to scheduling, sequencing, and selecting work using risk assessment frameworks and cost of delay analysis. These techniques are designed to help you make better, fact-based decisions that are easy to defend, reducing the time spent in prioritization meetings and increasing your confidence in backlog management.

Note: This course is self-paced, allowing you to learn at your convenience and apply your newfound knowledge as you progress.

Is this course right for me?

If you are responsible for prioritizing work—whether as a product manager, product owner, marketing director, or executive—this course is for you. If your prioritization meetings are intense, stressful, and frustrating, this class will provide you with practical, defensible techniques to cut through the clutter. It’s particularly useful for those involved in strategic planning, product management, product ownership, portfolio management, or any role where prioritization is critical.

Objectives

• Understand why traditional cost of delay methods may not work in your context and how to fix that.
• Master the qualitative and quantitative aspects of cost of delay.
• Learn to apply the 3-dimensions of qualitative cost of delay: shape, impact, and shelf-life.
• Build and use risk assessment frameworks that help you prioritize work more efficiently.
• Learn how to filter large backlogs down to a manageable scale using fact-based risk assessment and taxonomies.
• Use capacity allocation and demand-shaping thresholds to facilitate faster decision-making.

What will you do differently next Monday?

By the end of the course, you’ll be equipped to:

• Prioritize and sequence work faster using filtering techniques.
• Use risk assessments to make defensible, fact-based decisions about what to work on next.
• Confidently manage large backlogs without resorting to guesswork or complex equations.
• Reduce the time spent in prioritization meetings to 20-30 minutes with strong consensus.

Certification

Participants will receive the Managing Large Backlogs certificate from the David J Anderson School of Management if they:

1. Complete the course 
2. Receive a passing grade on the final exam

Participants will have access to course material for 6 months. The final exam consists of 40 multiple choice questions.