I was sitting across from one of my direct reports in a 1:1 (a manager I was actively working to develop) trying to explain what I meant when I said I wanted to see a stable operational foundation for their team.
It’s one of those things that feels obvious once you’ve built it and weirdly abstract until you have. So I did what I always do when words aren’t landing: I picked up a marker and turned to the whiteboard.
I drew the first thing that arrived in my mind: a triangle.
A triangle is a helpful visual: it’s stable and has three sides / apexes which correspond to three tools that every first-time (or seasoned) leader needs to have in place, not because they’re best practices from a leadership book, but because without them your team is essentially navigating by feel in the dark.
With them, you have a foundation stable enough to build on, adapt from, and return to when things get hard.
Apex 1: The Backlog (the What)
A backlog is, at its simplest, a living list of everything your team knows about: current work, upcoming work, work that’s been requested but not yet scoped, work that’s been identified but not yet prioritized. Everything goes on the list.
The key word is shared. A backlog that lives in one person’s head or in a notebook that closes when the meeting ends isn’t a backlog, it’s a liability. For a backlog to do its job, it needs to be in a shared digital space where every person on the team can see it, add to it, and update it without having to ask permission.
Here’s why this matters more than it sounds: the backlog is not primarily a productivity tool. It’s an anxiety reduction tool.