Prioritizing your backlog based on customer value is one of the key principles of agile methodologies. It helps you deliver the most important features and benefits to your users, while avoiding waste and over-engineering. But how do you decide what is valuable and what is not? Here are some tips and techniques to help you prioritize your backlog effectively.
Before you can prioritize your backlog, you need to have a clear understanding of what value means for your project and your stakeholders. Value can be measured in different ways, such as revenue, user satisfaction, market share, social impact, or strategic alignment. You should define your value criteria upfront and communicate them to your team and your customers. You can use tools like value proposition canvas, business model canvas, or lean canvas to help you articulate your value proposition and assumptions.
Oh, AI. Revenue isn't a measure of value in the customers' eyes. And it's a very lagging indicator. User satisfaction is also lagging, something you might not really know until later. Market share isn't customer value. Strategic alignment isn't customer value. If qualified Researchers have done great qualitative research with target audiences, then we know their tasks, needs, perspectives, etc. We would have problem statements written from users' perspectives. We can then match which backlog items directly address potential solutions for these problems.
Once you have your value criteria, you need a way to compare and rank your backlog items based on them. There are many prioritization frameworks that you can use, such as MoSCoW, Kano, RICE, WSJF, or Value vs Effort. These frameworks help you evaluate your backlog items based on different factors, such as must-have, should-have, could-have, and won't-have (MoSCoW), or reach, impact, confidence, and effort (RICE). You should choose a framework that suits your context and goals, and apply it consistently and transparently.
OK, but these don't really focus on customer-centricity or customer value, which this article promises. These are mostly frameworks based on size of job, effort, value to the business, etc. Make sure the customer is in the conversation, and not how we can manipulate them to achieve biz goals. If you prioritize your backlog based on customer value, then you are focused on what is likely to make new customers join, existing customers be freaking thrilled, and earning their loyalty. You can also look at what would make customers more independent (self-service), or what would solve customers' problems, taking stress off Customer Support.
Prioritizing your backlog based on customer value requires making some assumptions about what your customers want and need, and how they will react to your product or service. However, these assumptions can be wrong or change over time, so you need to validate them with real feedback and data. You can use techniques like user research, prototyping, testing, analytics, or surveys to gather evidence and learn from your customers. You should update your backlog and your prioritization based on your findings and insights.
No it doesn't. If we took the time to understand our target audiences and their needs, then we wouldn't make assumptions about them. We'd replace OGA (opinions, guesses, and assumptions) with EDK (evidence, data, and knowledge). Please stop making guesses about customers. That's unlikely to create value and satisfaction. Think about all of the frustrations and anger you've had with companies that made incorrect assumptions about you. Now take that anger into your job and stop teams from doing the same to others! Great research done by experts takes time and costs money, but will take less time and cost less money than our cycles of assumptions, hoping people like things, sprints based on what we "believe" might work, etc.
Prioritizing your backlog based on customer value is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process. You should review and adjust your backlog regularly, based on new information, changing requirements, feedback, or market conditions. You should also involve your team and your customers in your prioritization process, and solicit their input and feedback. You can use ceremonies like backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review, or release planning to review and adjust your backlog collaboratively and iteratively.
Finally, when prioritizing your backlog based on customer value, you should focus on the outcomes that you want to achieve, not the outputs that you want to produce. Outcomes are the benefits or changes that you deliver to your customers, while outputs are the features or functionalities that you build or deliver. You should prioritize your backlog based on the outcomes that matter most to your customers, and use outputs as a means to achieve them. You should also measure and evaluate your success based on the outcomes that you deliver, not the outputs that you produce.
Remember that your outcomes (leading and lagging indicators/metrics) must include metrics that indicate success the way the customer defines it. If the customer wants to be efficient in your system, and you built a slow system with lots of pages because your company loves page views, that's not success. That's a bad customer outcome. Think critically about KPIs and OKRs. Don't allow them to be customer-peripheric (what I call anti-customer-centric). Speak up when the company is pushing teams to do things to "make the numbers" but that work against customers' needs and outcomes. What outcomes do customers desire for themselves?