Streamline task management by maintaining an organised backlog.
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A growth backlog is simply a ranked to-do list of ideas that could drive revenue, leads, or retention. Imagine a shared spreadsheet or board where every suggestion—“improve proposal template”, “launch referral scheme”, “add pricing calculator”—sits in one place, waiting its turn. Unlike a random wish-list, the backlog is organised, scored, and regularly reviewed so the highest-impact experiments always rise to the top. It is the growth team’s equivalent of a developer’s product backlog: a living queue that turns scattered thoughts into a clear execution plan.
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Watch nine hours of focused lessons, duplicate the templates, and run your first 12-week cycle on your own schedule.
Get the course plus 12 live group calls. Get weekly feedback and accountability to implement compound growth.
Hire Ewoud as a fractional Head of Growth for one day a week. Your metrics lift while your team learns the system hands-on, then takes over a fully documented playbook at week twelve.
Service firms juggle client work, delivery deadlines, and internal marketing. Without a backlog, ideas pop up in Slack and vanish in inboxes. A single queue prevents context switching and lets the team work methodically instead of chasing the loudest request.
When sales, delivery, and leadership can see the same ranked list, debates shift from “my idea versus yours” to “which item will move pipeline fastest?” That transparency short-circuits politics and speeds approval cycles.
Each item enters the backlog with a clear hypothesis and metric. As experiments run, results feed back into the list—successful ideas become standard practice; failed ones teach a lesson. Over time the backlog becomes an institutional memory of what works for your market.
Resource-strapped growth teams need guardrails. A maintained backlog makes it obvious when workload exceeds bandwidth, forcing realistic sprint planning rather than hidden over-commitment that leads to burnout.
Use a Kanban tool, a spreadsheet, or a Notion board—format is less important than consistency. Any team-member can add items, but every card needs:
Apply a simple ICE or RICE model. For each item, estimate:
Pick the top items your team can handle in the next two weeks. For a five-person agency, that might be three experiments: redesign the case-study CTA, test a new webinar topic, and automate proposal follow-ups. Move them to an “In progress” column and ignore the rest until the sprint ends.
Attach a quick experiment doc: hypothesis, steps, metric baseline, projected lift. When the test finishes, add the result—positive, neutral, or negative. A negative result is valuable if it stops you wasting future effort. Push winners into “Adopted”, archive losers, and update your playbook.
Invite marketing, sales, and delivery reps to a 30-minute grooming session. Archive stale ideas, merge duplicates, and re-score items if assumptions change. In a B2B SaaS consultancy, a surge of client interest in AI integrations might bump “AI demo templates” higher than last month’s social-proof tweak.
As the backlog proves its worth, add tags: channel, funnel stage, persona. This lets you slice data—perhaps 70 % of high-impact wins came from pricing or onboarding tweaks. That insight guides the next wave of ideation and keeps the growth machine compounding.
Treat each as a potential lever, score it, run it, and feed the learning back into the list. Over time, the growth backlog becomes the engine room driving consistent, data-led improvement.
Put data, tools, and targets in line. One dashboard, a clean CRM, and automated weekly reporting mean no more manual guess-work.
See topicDrive rapid growth through innovative, cost-effective strategies.
A visual tool for tracking key growth metrics and progress.
The systems and processes supporting scalable business growth.
A repeatable and scalable system to drive consistent growth.
Key factors or tactics that significantly impact a company's growth.
Transform constraints into opportunities to drive smarter decisions and growth.
Break through stagnation with actionable strategies to reignite business growth.
Identify and activate growth levers to scale your business faster.
Validate your product's value proposition to align with market demands.