Product Backlog Prioritisation
The Product Owner has a critical role in prioritising the backlog. It’s about all features under consideration and finding their place in the backlog.
When using a funnel shape backlog, this is a much easier task than a stack backlog. With a funnel shaped backlog, we use the product vision, road map and release plan as inputs. Using this approach helps us focus on value, over things that can get in way like organisational politics, first-in-first-out or own projections of what matters. Its not technical preferences, costs or difficulty, but what items will provide values to customers and align with the bigger goals.
Prioritise items based on customer value
Typically as the team starts off. Product Owner’s priorities are in chunks, far too big for the team to work on. This results in features that cannot be completed within a Sprint.
Prioritisation Techniques
Forced ranking
- Effective teams and product owners know what their priorities are. Their items are ranked. I don’t advocated to rank all the items in the backlog, but for sure the top 10 priorities in the near future and top 10 consensual items that are further out. I don’t want to rank hundreds of items, that's just too difficult and quiet frankly a waste of time. Priorities change easily and we want prioritisation to be as clean and easy as possible.
- Force rank the items. To do this, we look at any 2 items and ask which is higher priority. Focussing only on 2 at a time, makes decision making much easier.
- Let the team discuss design options, rewrite or add feature cards to the stories. This is best done in small groups no more than 8 members. Keep groups small when doing forced ranking.
- Ask each small group to share the end results.
- You can also this exercise by Persona group. Ask each small team to prioritise based on a give User Role/Persona. Each group would represent a Persona, prioritising what’s important to them, empathising with what the key users would want or need.
Grouping/categorisation prioritisation
- Creating a hierarchical grouping of items, helps many teams make decisions and stay focussed.
- It involves grouping the items in the backlog into categories like high(must-have items), medium(nice-to-have items) and low(unnecessary items).
- Guiding the team on what each category means is a very important step.
- One commonly used categorisation technique is MoSoCoW(M:Must have, S:Should have, C:Could have, W:Won’t have)
Voting
- Technique that gets the team to discuss priorities. When I do a voting meeting, I prepare the items to vote on. Usually happens with about 10 items. More than 10 makes it messy.
- Offer adequate context about the items.
- Set up voting criteria and explain it to the participants. When providing this direction, consider what user group you are focusing on and what are the goals from a user perspective.
- Set the voting process, things like, How many items will be voted on? How many votes per person? How many votes can each place for each item? Is the voting silent or with discussion?
Buy a feature
Put your money where your values are
- Imagine if you could test customers on what they would actually pay for.
- Participants must pool their money(virtual) together to purchase items they value.
- To start, create a list of stories(10 to 30 items) and assign a price to each item. The price should be best guess of development costs or potential value or what you might even charge a customer.
- Decide how much money to give each participant and distribute the money.
- Only distribute 40% to 70% of the money to buy all the items. This will get the participants talking and debating.
Story Mapping
- Story mapping is a great way to document the MVP by organising and prioritising user stories.
- You first create task-oriented story cards and group them into a workflow. You then arrange the cards in priority order for each group.
- The final step is to draw a line (often with tape) across all the stories to divide them into releases/sprints. I would suggest reading User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.
Kano Model
There are some basic features that your product simply needs to have in order for you to sell your product in the market. You need to have these “threshold” features, but continuing to invest in them won’t improve customer delight dramatically.
There are some features (like performance) that give you a proportionate increase in customer satisfaction as you invest in them. Finally, there are some “excitement” features that you can invest in, that will yield a disproportionate increase in customer delight. If you don’t have these features, customers might not even miss them. But if you include them, and continue to invest in them you will create dramatic customer delight. I would suggest reading 'The Complete Guide to the Kano Model'.