Product Management: Backlog

Question 1

How should the backlog be structured?

Answer 1

1. Next Sprint
2. Sprint 1- 3 Ready
3. Future Releases

Question 2

What does the backlog contain

Answer 2

user stories and acceptance criteria
bug fixes
feature updates
infrastructure updates
Technical debt

Question 3

How should Sprint backlog be prioritized

Answer 3

1. 10% Technical debt/ emergent issues
2. 70% Metric movers
3. 10 % Customer Stakeholder requests
4. 10 % Customer Delights

Question 4

Methods for prioritizing the product backlog

Answer 4

RICE
Kano
Benefit Effort Matrix
Stack Ranking
MoSCoW
Story Mapping
weighted Scoring

Question 5

Stack Ranking

Answer 5

Ranking features from most important to least important. When the team completed a feature they move on to the next feature on the list

Benefits:

• straight forward and easy
• avoids priority creep “impossible for everything to be considered high priority”

Pitfalls

• Heavily biased towards the opinion of the product manager
• Difficult to analyze and reprioritize based on changing prioritize

Question 6

MoSCow

Answer 6

Tasks are broken into four prioritization categories: Must have, Should have, Could have, Will likely not have

Must have: features critical for mvp

Should have: Features that are not critical for MVP, but critical for the product

Could have: Features that are nice to have (to be done if there is time), but not critical for the product

Will likely not have: Features that are not to be included, but might appear in later releases

Benefits

• Straight forward and easy
• Helps define the scope of current release and scope of future releases
• Highlights resource capacity and what is able to be accomplished today vs. Tomorrow

Pitfalls

• Subjective, and easy to for teams to consider everything as a Must Have
• Best used to define the scope for release vs feature prioritization

Question 7

Kan

Answer 7

Prioritization based on how likely customers are to find value in them, Kano uses a simple visual map to map out the relationship between features and user satisfaction and segment it into 3 categories: basic needs, performance needs, and delighter needs.

Benefits:
-allow to quickly identify user-centric features
-Giving voice to the customers
Identifies product opportunities and current functionality gaps

Pitfalls:

• Needs continuous assessment to account for the impact of time
• Difficult to consolidate inconsistent customer perception

Question 8

Story Mapping

Answer 8

Release Broken into stages of the user journey. Each stage is then broken into smaller stories and sorted from most to least important

Benefits
-straight forward
-Visibility of product goals and vision
Clear visualization of potential enhancements
Easy communication to stakeholders

Pitfalls

• Because it is so user-focused, it is easy for non-visible things to fall by the wayside
• Can lead to re-work if there is ambiguity around the customer and or problem

Question 9

weighted Scoring

Answer 9

Features are pulled into the list and scored according to a set of common criteria on a cost versus benefits basis and then ranked by their final scores

Benefits

• This method if used correctly minimizes individual bias in the prioritization
• it provides a quantitative estimate of the impact so it is easier to track the success
• Weighted scoring establishes transparency with stakeholders

Pitfalls:

• The impact is still an estimate so it needs to be based on the validated hypothesis
• Priortization can be skewed

Question 10

4 Key inputs and considerations when building a roadmap?

Answer 10

1. Key problem
2. Solution for the problem
   3 Goals/OKRs of the product
3. Higher level mission of the company