A backlog is a spreadsheet. A decision is not.
Most teams score their backlog in a grid on the morning of sprint planning and lose the reasoning by the next one. Tarazu keeps the reasoning.
Why it exists
I kept watching the same thing happen on product teams: someone opens a spreadsheet, plugs in reach and impact and confidence, and out comes a ranking everyone nods at. Three months later, someone asks why the fourth item shipped before the second, and nobody remembers. The numbers are still there. The argument that produced them is gone, because a spreadsheet has nowhere to put it.
Tarazu keeps the argument. It scores a backlog the same way most teams already do — RICE, plotted as a tradeoff instead of collapsed into one number — and it holds onto the reasoning behind each score long enough for someone to check it later.
What it isn't
It's not a roadmap tool or a project tracker, and it doesn't make the call for you. The AI drafts a score; a person decides whether to keep it. Where it stops is on purpose — a ranked list and a written-down reason is the handoff to whatever you actually run delivery in.
Who built it
I'm Kristen Martino, an AI-native product manager with a Master's in Business Analytics from UT Dallas. I built Tarazu myself — product decisions and code both.
Writing the PRD before touching the backlog UI was slower than it needed to be, but it's also the reason the scoring model, the AI, and the tradeoff map agree with each other instead of pulling in three directions. That PRD, the competitive research, and the launch plan are still in the repo.
The source is on GitHub if you want to see how any of it works.
The name
Tarazu (तराज़ू / ترازو) is the Hindi and Urdu word for a balance scale, from the Persian tarāzū. A scale doesn't decide anything — it shows you which side is heavier and leaves the rest to you. That's the whole design philosophy in one object.
How it works covers the full loop end to end, and the RICE guide gets into the scoring model, including where it breaks down.
Weigh something real.
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