Remember Asteroids? I played it for hours on my Atari system back in the day (yes, I am an 80s child). Well, did you ever think of playing Asteroids with your product backlog?

I can't claim credit for this idea; it came out of a course I did last week (you know who you are). As we were talking about the continuous evolution and grooming of the product backlog, one brilliant guy yelled out, "Ah - I get it! Grooming the product backlog is like playing Asteroids - you shoot the big ones into little pieces!"

That's exactly it. When you're in your space ship with your team and you notice that the next few items on the backlog are really big asteroids, start shooting. The idea is to break them into little pieces so that they're the right size for the sprint. You don't want to go into a sprint with huge asteroids. It's dangerous. Huge asteroids in sprint planning will cause ship system errors during the sprint, possibly causing system failure. Huge asteroids are hard to estimate, they can have unknown gravitational pull, various sizes of craters and can move an unknown speeds. Breaking huge asteroids down into little ones helps us know what we're dealing with.

Big asteroids at the bottom of the product backlog are not as concerning for the team. They could be light years away, and by the time they might reach us, we could have changed direction anyway.  

Beware of big asteroids near the top of the product backlog!