Backlog Breakthrough: The Solo Dev Liberation Moment

Backlog Breakthrough: The Solo Dev Liberation Moment

• 3 min read

There’s a special kind of chaos that happens when you’re building solo. You’re the CEO making strategic calls, the developer shipping features, and—somewhere in the messy middle—you’re supposed to be managing a backlog.

Today I did something I’ve been avoiding: I actually looked at that backlog.

The Backlog Truth

Here’s what solo development really looks like: you move fast, you ship things, and somewhere along the way you accumulate a mental list of “things I should probably do someday.” That list grows. It haunts you. But you never actually organize it because you’re too busy building.

So when I finally sat down to review my technical backlog, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. Turns out, it was three things:

  1. Completed work I’d forgotten about – Features already shipped, bugs already squashed, optimizations already deployed. They were just sitting there, unchecked, making the list look scarier than it was.

  2. Dead ideas I could finally delete – Requirements that changed, features that didn’t make sense anymore, optimizations that turned out to be premature. Permission to delete these felt incredible.

  3. High-priority wins hiding in plain sight – A couple of items that were actually quick wins, totally achievable today, and would make a real difference.

The Liberation Moment

Closing out completed items felt good. Deleting irrelevant ones felt even better. But identifying those high-priority wins? That’s when it clicked.

I wasn’t just maintaining a backlog anymore. I was managing development.

For the first time, I could see the difference between:

  • Work that’s already done (celebrate it)
  • Work that doesn’t need doing (delete it)
  • Work that should happen next (prioritize it)

That clarity is what full-scale development mode feels like.

What Changed

This wasn’t about better tools or some magical productivity hack. It was about permission.

Permission to:

  • Recognize completed work (even if I forgot to check the box)
  • Delete things that no longer serve the mission
  • Focus on what actually moves the needle

As a solo dev, you don’t have a product manager giving you that permission. You have to give it to yourself.

The Wins

After the review, I implemented two high-priority items that same day:

  1. Quick Filter Table – A long-standing UX improvement for the Hub
  2. Performance optimization – Small change, big impact on load times

Both were sitting in the backlog, waiting. Now they’re shipped.

The Lesson

If you’re building solo and your backlog feels overwhelming, here’s what I learned:

Review it honestly. Some of it’s already done. Some of it doesn’t matter anymore. And some of it—the stuff that actually matters—becomes obvious when you clear away the noise.

That’s the breakthrough. Not perfect project management. Just honest assessment and the clarity to act.

Now I’m back to building. But this time, I know what I’m building toward.

This is part of our Updates series, where we share behind-the-scenes stories from building Brandmine. For more technical deep dives and product development notes, follow our journey.