Someone important asked for something. Maybe it was the CEO after a board meeting. A VP after a customer dinner. A sales leader after losing a deal. The request was urgent. It went straight to the top of the backlog. Priority: critical.
That was then. The person who asked might have moved on. Left the company. Changed their mind. Forgotten they even asked.
The ticket doesn't know that. It's still sitting there, marked urgent, blocking other work.
Why stakeholder requests decay faster
Feature requests from users decay because the market changes. Stakeholder requests decay for a different reason. They're often tied to a moment. A conversation. An emotion. A board meeting where someone felt pressure.
The underlying business need might be real. But the specific request was shaped by a moment that no longer exists. The urgency was borrowed from a context that's gone.
The politics of stale requests
Nobody wants to close a ticket the CEO created. So it sits. Teams work around it. It blocks planning because everyone knows it's there but nobody knows if it still matters.
Asking "is this still important?" feels like challenging authority. So nobody asks. The ticket ages. Resources stay allocated to a ghost priority.
The sunk cost trap
The longer a stakeholder request sits in the backlog, the harder it is to kill. "We've already been planning for this" becomes the justification. Not customer need. Not market demand. Just the fact that it's been there for a while.
How to fix it
Every stakeholder request gets a 30-day expiration. After 30 days, go back to the requester and ask one question: "Is this still the most important thing?" Not "do you still want this?" Everyone still wants things. The question is whether it's still worth doing next.
If the stakeholder doesn't respond within a week, archive it. Silence is an answer.
Tom Pinder