How do you prioritize user stories in your product backlog?

An important aspect of creating a Product Vision and the metrics to go with it is to understand and define the outcomes. Outcomes that are focused on user behaviors needed to get to the bigger picture business metrics. These user behaviors become the missing link for many teams that align the organizational strategy to the product strategy. So, a Product Vision should focus on the change being created from a user point value/experience point of view. For Example: With this product we want to make our premium customers faster at reordering from us, unlike today where they typically spend 30 min to reorder and the abandon rate it high during this time.

To prioritize user stories, I use a value-driven approach, focusing on the business impact, user needs, and technical feasibility. I rely on MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) for classification and collaborate with stakeholders to align on priorities. Additionally, I leverage Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) to assess the cost of delay against implementation effort.

It is important to have a business vision, strategy, and objectives together as they form the most impactful product vision. With that, business objectives and product vision can be tied together to to set goals & objectives for the product. Next step is to translate these goals & objectives into metrics to measure success/failure of the product and eliminate subjectivity from product objectives. Never jump to feature prioritization until this step is complete with 100% buy in from all stakeholders including customers (if they are involved in this process).

A helpful method to prioritizing user stories is epic impact mapping. Epics should be evaluated for their role, need and impact to the business, then placed in a hierarchical order of importance relative to OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and/or business goals. User stories that are associated with the highest priority epics should be picked off the backlog before those associated with lower priority epics.

A great starting point for all of life's activities and even the most simple things in our daily lives, like when a friend wanted help with a cake for her friend's birthday. It was important to have a clear vision and goals for the cake. What kind of cake she want to make, who (the kind of person) is it meant for, and how she will know if he like it? These helped to guide the recipe and ingredients, and helped align the cake with my friend's preferences and dietary needs. We employed tools like pictures of existing designs, sketches to show the modifications to the existing designs, lists to define and communicate the overall vision and goals.

It is important to have an "anchor" customer you work closely with. You should pick one that you have strategic alignment with, versus one that is likely to posture or look for leverage in the relationship. This allows for the best, deep, unbiased feedback to surface.

Some helpful tips for identifying user needs when developing an application: - Identify your target audience - Perform exploratory research - Review expert advice - Examine existing applications - Understand the user journey - Create an empathy map

Instruct sales team to briefly introduce a feature planned for upcoming sprints to trusted customers and record their reaction is extremely valuable. This validates the user research that goes behind in creating a feature.

Continual analysis and communication are key to the prioritization process. As work comes into my Team's queue, I review and analyze the following: - The Priority from the Requester (is the Priority accurate?) - The Target Date from the Requester (is it a Dependency for an Epic or blocking another Team's progress?) - Where is it positioned in terms of the WSJF score that was provided by the Business Owner? - Is it something that is Customer impacting? What are the specific impacts? - Is it something that Leadership is requesting? This is generally indicative that a higher Priority is needed. - Has it been discussed on Sync calls with our operations partners? All of these points help to define relative priority.

Once you know who your users and the above attributes of them, determine the target user group. This is the group you are most strategically building for. This is the user group whose success using the product (or feature) matters the most to the larger success metrics. This will help you and the team prioritize conflicting user stories, and design for the target user group. Just because a user group isn't your target doesn't mean that they don't matter, rather this helps the options, designs and requirements conflicts get resolved more easily. Your requirements, solution design, and decisions should work great for the target user and be "good enough" for the other user groups.

Align user stories with business objectives so that you know each feature or enhancement serves an ultimate purpose beyond just adding something new. Connect each story to a business purpose so that there is more than just novelty in adding a feature or improvement. Organize user stories by their relevance to the desired outcome, so that you can allocate resources appropriately and maximize returns. Consider how the stories may be grouped together for larger projects or divided into multiple smaller tasks for quicker development cycles. Prioritize further by understanding which features are necessary before any other work can begin and which can wait until later stages. Identifying both will help you develop an effective timeline.

Say you’re tackling a project to speed up your website. Here’s an example using RICE to prioritize competing site speed issues. For each story, we’ll assign a score: Reach - how many page views will be affected by this change? Impact - what is the expected lift (in milliseconds, %, etc) of this change? Confidence - how sure are we that this will have the forecasted effect? Has is been done many times before? Have we run an experiment? Effort - how much work is it to implement each of these items, on your stack, with your team? Story points work well here for example. The score for each story would then be: (R*I*C)/E Higher effort results in a lower overall score, as viability is a critical component to prioritization.

I have found success prioritizing user stories against the metrics and outcomes outlined in the product vision. For example, if the product vision for creating "collaboration articles" has metrics aligned for making the user faster at contributing to an article, I would facilitate the team through a conversation and exercise where the teams assumptions and hypothesis come forward on which user stories will impact this metric the most, creating a forced ranking 1-10 on which 10, in order, we believe will make the most impact on the vision. So, of 30 user stories about users contributing to articles, which will make the most impact on that user outcome? The team usually can prioritize the top 10 in order pretty easily.

Prioritization should be based objectives and not based on results obtained from a framework. No matter how good a framework we choose, there is always a margin of error that's never accounted for in the final result. Not just that, frameworks rank features based on a set of variables but the reality is that product objectives and strategy cannot be deduced to some variables. Prioritization is a step by step approach starting with Business Vision -> Product Vision -> ... and finally Product Roadmap. This will ensure that features in the roadmap are aligned with overall company's vision and goals.

During retros and sprint planning, below are three considerations for validating and refining user story priorities: 1) Potential gains vs effort required 2) Likelihood of success 3) Important use cases vs infrastructure improvements

It's important for continuous user feedback be put into the prioritization as well. User feedback that also aligns to the outcomes that you are looking for with the effort. User feedback can be done through observation, focus groups, data insights on usage and process metrics to name a few. Not all user feedback implies a prioritization shift, but with a solid product vision and metrics it is a lot easier to know what user feedback matters. Feedback loops are critical to the team's learning and prioritization.