Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. — Aristotle
Aristotle settled for one soul in two bodies. I’m going to hand you three, and by the end of this article, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them. That’s a promise!
A project manager’s role is a stressful one, and for good reason. You’re expected to manage stakeholders across a broad hierarchy, keep every one of them satisfied, and stay accountable for progress — all at once. One person, expected to have every answer ready, while quietly handling risks and scope creep (yes, those surprise gifts arrive more often than we’d like). You can feel the pressure just reading about it. Imagine holding it.
Picture this.
You’re three months into a six-month project to build a drinking water reminder app and take it live across every app store. You’ve got a cross-functional team of ten, spread fairly across functions and genuinely invested in the work. The backlog holds 500 action items (only!). And then the sponsor makes a dramatic entrance, wanting to know how far along we are and whether their money is being spent well.
Questions like:
🤔 How much of the product is actually ready?
🤔 Are resources being used wisely?
🤔 Should we be worried about the timeline?
🤔 The bugs QAs flagged to our engineers — have they been handled?
Not so fun once you picture yourself in that room, is it?
A GIFT TO US ALL
This is where the creations of corporate legends, built for structure and governance, quietly earn their place. I’m talking about project management software: Jira, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Notion, and plenty more. Here’s the thing. The three best friends I keep mentioning live inside these platforms. You’ve used them a hundred times without ever noticing how much they were carrying. And the best part — they aren’t locked away in fancy PM software. They’re right there in Excel and Google Sheets too. From a plain spreadsheet to a colorful kanban board to a complex list view, these three friends will carry you through understanding, analysis, and decision-making alike.
Without further ado, allow me to introduce you properly.
“Dear reader… meet Sort, Group, and Filter — your most loyal teammates, always on call, and quietly faithful to anyone managing projects, products, or a business.”
“And you three (* sort, group, filter nodding from the corner *) — meet our reader. A brilliant professional who’s about to find out exactly what you can do.”
Now drama aside, let’s take these three seriously.
We reach for them every single day and rarely stop to notice how much they’re holding up. So, let’s fix that one friend at a time, using the water reminder app from earlier.
SORTING
Sorting answers a single question: what comes first? It takes a shapeless pile and gives it an order, i.e., what was a priority yesterday, what’s urgent today, what’s waiting in line. Get it right and your backlog stops being a list and starts being a sequenced plan so resources go where they matter most.
- In the app: Sort the 500 items by estimated due date, and the team instantly knows what to pick up first.
- Pro tip: Sort on more than one field at once. Sort by due date and impact level — now, even among the urgent items, you can see which ones truly deserve to go first.
GROUPING
Grouping answers a different question: what belongs together? It reveals how work items relate and who owns what, turning a flat backlog into something you can actually hold accountable — just by using the fields already sitting in your data.
- In the app: Group the 500 items by their broadest work type. If you’re working in agile, group by Epic and watch related tasks and subtasks fall into place, so you can read the progress of each deliverable at a glance.
- Pro tip: Group in layers — first by work type, then by work function. Now you can tell whether an epic with 20 tasks needs several teams or whether one team can carry it solo. When it’s the latter, work moves from To Do to Done far quicker.
FILTERING
Filtering answers the most in-the-moment question of the three: what deserves my attention right now? It cuts through the noise, pulling only what you’re looking for into view and clearing away everything that doesn’t move you toward the outcome you’re chasing.
- In the app: Filter the backlog by work type to show only Bugs, and you’ve instantly got a status-backed picture of how many were raised versus resolved — enough to calculate a metric like Open Defect Count.
- Pro tip: Stack your filters. Filter by work type to isolate the bugs, then by item creation date — and you’ll spot the ones quietly going stale, still unresolved long after they were raised. Those are the ones that turn into real setbacks when no one’s looking.
Now let’s return to that room where you’re building a drinking water reminder app — except this time you walk in as a project manager who’s just made friends with Sort, Group, and Filter. Same sponsor, same four questions. Let’s watch you handle them.
I. How much of the product is ready?
First, I filter the backlog down to just epics and stories. I leave out the tasks and subtasks, not because they don’t matter, but because they already roll up into the stories above them, and I don’t want to count the same work twice.
Say that leaves me around 50 items that actually represent deliverable scope. Then I filter by status to see how many read “Complete” — say 30, with the other 20 still To Do or In Progress. But I don’t quote the sponsor a headcount, because ten small items and ten large ones aren’t the same thing. Would you agree? Instead, I measure by the effort behind them, and by effort, we’re 60% of the way there. That’s the number I hand him with the honest confidence that we’re still moving.
II. Are resources being used wisely?
This one’s a personal favorite, because the sponsor is really asking two things at once: is his money working the way he intended, and is his team being treated fairly? Idle hands and uneven workloads are the same problem wearing different clothes — both are budget quietly burning. So, I group the work items by the assignee field to see what each of the ten is carrying.
Say three developers hold 3, 5, and 8 tasks. At a glance, that looks unfair to whoever’s got 8. But count is a liar. Look closer and the eight are medium-impact while the three are high-impact. The load balances the moment you weight it by effort instead of counting heads. That’s what I show the sponsor: not just that nobody’s idle, but that nobody’s buried either.
III. Should we be worried about the timeline?
Here’s where all three friends work together. We’re three months in and 60% of the effort is done, so our demonstrated pace is roughly 20% a month. The remaining 40% needs about two months, and we have three. That’s not a hope; it’s a number, drawn straight from work we’ve already delivered.
To pressure-test it, I filter to epics and stories, group them by status, and sort by effort — one clean view that shows whether the pace holds. If the remaining work looks heavier than what we’ve cleared, I flag it now, not in month five. Either way, the sponsor gets the truth early.
IV. The bugs flagged by testers — have they been handled?
After all that, this one’s easy. I filter the backlog to Bugs, then — remember the pro tip — filter again by creation date. That doesn’t just count what’s open; it surfaces the ones quietly going stale, still unresolved long after they were raised. Say one is still there. I check it’s with the right engineer and set its priority by how much damage it can do. That’s the honest answer: the project’s under control, and nothing’s slipping through the cracks unnoticed.
Four questions. Three friends.
One backlog that already held every answer.
We just needed to know how to ask…
And that’s the quiet truth of it. Sorting, grouping, and filtering run through everything a project manager does: shaping the backlog, sharing the load fairly, tracking progress, measuring performance, keeping the whole thing transparent. We lean on them constantly and rarely thank them for it.
Which brings me back to Aristotle. One soul, two bodies — that was his idea of friendship. Ours turned out to be one soul in a hundred bodies: the same three companions living inside Jira, ClickUp, a battered Excel sheet, even sticky notes on a wall.
A startup of twelve has them. An enterprise of twelve thousand has them. Whatever you’re managing, wherever you’re managing it — your 3 best friends are already there, waiting for you to put them to work.
I told you at the start you’d wonder how you ever managed without them. So, what are your thoughts?