A Graveyard is an anti-pattern where a living document, like a Backlog, slowly turns into a dump of neglected items that nobody trusts. The document still exists, but it no longer guides decisions, and adding new entries becomes a way of postponing responsibility rather than making progress.
A Graveyard forms when there is no named Document Owner and no regular habit of review. Items pile up faster than they are clarified, merged, removed, or acted on. Over time the document becomes harder to read, harder to search, and emotionally unpleasant to open, so people stop using it, which accelerates the decay.
A common failure mode is the “everything is high priority” collapse. If the list is never reordered, then urgent work is mixed with nice-to-haves, and the backlog stops being a tool for trade-offs.
Another failure mode is the “vague wish list,” where items are written as slogans rather than outcomes, so nobody can tell what done means or how to start.
Graveyards also grow through duplication and fragmentation. The same idea appears five times with slightly different wording, or one big item hides ten separate tasks inside it. People then argue about which version is “the real one,” or they avoid touching it because it feels risky.
Another failure mode is “captured but never closed.” People add items to be polite, to end meetings, or to make someone feel heard, but nothing ever gets resolved. This teaches contributors that writing things down is theatre, and the document becomes a symbol of drift rather than a source of alignment.
A Graveyard creates predictable harms. New contributors cannot tell what matters. Important issues become invisible because they are buried. Decisions get re-litigated because the history is unclear. Work becomes reactive and political because the shared reference point has stopped functioning.
The cure is not a better tool, it is a ritual and a role. Name a Document Owner, set a lightweight review cadence, and treat deletion as a sign of health. If something is genuinely not going to happen, mark it as rejected with a reason, or archive it somewhere that is explicitly not the live backlog. The goal is to restore trust that the document reflects reality.