Try splitting your own backlog

What you will learn Not a chapter to read but one to do. Take one work item you have in flight, split it down to atomic units, and see for yourself whether those units stand in a single queue because of their dependencies.

What you need

text

□ 40 minutes□ A sheet of paper or a whiteboard□ One work item in flight — not a finished one, one you are doing now   · a few days to a few weeks in size   · something the team knows, not only you□ Ideally with the person actually doing the work

"Not a finished one" is the part that matters. Finished work splits cleanly because you already know how it turned out. Only live work shows you the real dependencies.

No suitable item? Use this one — "Improve account deletion: capture a reason, mask personal data, and show deletion statistics to admins."

Step 1 — Write it as one sentence (5 min)

Write the item as a sentence, not a title.

text

✗ "Account management improvements"                    ← a title✓ "Capture a reason on deletion and mask personal data" ← a sentence

What to look for

text

□ Does it contain "and"?□ Does a comma join two separate actions?

If either is true it is already more than one item. That is the raw material for step 2.

Step 2 — Cut at the conjunctions (10 min)

Split at the conjunctions and make a list. You should end up with four or more lines.

#	Atomic unit	Fits in one sentence?
1
2
3
4
5

text

The example item, split:  1. Add a reason picker to the deletion screen  2. Mask name and contact details on deletion  3. Create somewhere to store the deletion reason  4. Show deletion-reason statistics on the admin screen  5. Send a deletion confirmation email

Most teams get this far easily. The next step is where it bites.

Step 3 — Draw the arrows (10 min)

This is the point of the exercise. Between the lines, draw an arrow wherever "this has to finish before that can start".

text

3 ──→ 1     (there must be somewhere to store it before you can pick it)3 ──→ 4     (there must be stored data before you can count it)2           (stands alone)5           (stands alone)

What to look for

What you drew	What it means
No arrows at all	already independent. Rare
One continuous chain	splitting bought you nothing. Go to step 4
One or two clusters	normal. Take just those to step 4

The middle row is the normal outcome. This is where most teams see that "we thought we had split it, but it was one queue all along" — the claim that splitting alone is not enough, verified on paper.

Step 4 — Re-cut vertically (10 min)

Take whatever the arrows tied together and cut it again by feature, not by layer.

text

[Cut by layer — arrows appear]  3. create storage → 1. let them pick it → 4. show the statistics[Re-cut by feature — each one runs to completion alone]  A. Capture the reason  : storage + screen + saving, as one piece  B. Show the statistics : reads what A created and renders it

An arrow still remains between A and B. When that happens, fix the contract first.

text

Step 0 (5 min): decide only where and in what shape the reason is storedThen          : A and B in parallel

Fix the shape first and the rest becomes parallel. Those five minutes buy you days.

Step 5 — Judge by deployment (5 min)

The final gate. Ask each piece one question.

text

□ Could you ship this one alone without breaking anything?

Answer	Verdict
Yes	✓ it is atomic
"Something else has to ship first"	still tied. Back to step 4
"It ships, but the screen is half-finished"	put it behind a switch and ship it off

The third row is the trick. The constraint "you cannot ship something unfinished" creates half of all dependencies. If you can ship it switched off, that half disappears.

Self-check

text

□ The original item split into four or more□ Arrows actually appeared in step 3   ← if none did, you cut too coarsely□ You removed at least one arrow□ Every remaining arrow can be explained as inherently sequential

If the third is unchecked, go back to step 4. If you could not remove a single arrow, either the work is genuinely sequential or you are still cutting by layer.

Check yourself

1. What does it mean if step 3 produces one continuous chain?

Answer

That splitting bought you nothing. Five pieces in a queue still have to be worked through in order, so no parallelism appears. The point of a micro-sprint is independence, not size.

2. Explain "cut vertically" using this exercise.

Answer

Storage → screen → statistics is a cut by layer, and each waits on the last. Cutting by feature — "capture the reason" running from storage through to the screen on its own — means it waits for nothing.

3. Why does "it ships, but the screen is half-finished" count as independent?

Answer

Because you can ship it behind a switch, turned off. The constraint that unfinished work cannot ship creates a large share of all dependencies, and shipping it switched off removes that constraint.

Next: what a developer's output turns into → IntentOps