Process for Prioritising the Product Backlog

I’ve spent the past year bringing a new product to market, as a consultant Head of Product for a start-up business unit that’s owned by a multi-national. I had the opportunity to pretty much start at the beginning: pulling together the vision, setting up a product council/steering group, talking to users about the initial concepts and shape the overall product direction.

After launching V1 of the product I ran a number of prioritisation meetings with key business stakeholders.

I’ve chaired and been involved in many different types of prioritisation meetings before. Somewhere there were up to 12 frustrated web editors (who managed sites where advertising was the major revenue stream) all had to bid for a slice of the scarce development resource. Prioritisation was done purely based on revenue: those sites whose demand for inventory was higher than what they were supplying won out.

Other prioritisation meetings comprised of me (the product manager) having to present and persuade senior stakeholders of the validity of a pre-prioritised backlog and drive consensus.

 Recently I decided to use the following process to not only prioritise the backlog but to aid in building unity among a group of stakeholders and win their confidence and trust:

1. We agreed on the goal for the next quarter – in this case it was to build our user base as opposed to driving revenue. A hard sell for an ad funded business. 
2. We went through the backlog and as a group agreed on the category of every item: User engagement, revenue, contractual, audience, acquisition etc... Most where no-brainers,  but the key was that the group felt that it had categorised the backlog. 
3. By common consent a champion was assigned to represent each backlog item (represented in the meeting was: Heads of Marketing, Ad Operations, Head of Product, Tech Team Lead and the MD/General Manager of the business unit). 
4. The champion would then give an elevator pitch on the importance of their backlog item followed by a brief Q&A cum discussion. 
5. We would then vote (in the same way you play poker in scrum) on how the item would best fulfill the goal we all agreed on. Each score is then entered into the spread sheet. 
6. When we get to the end of the backlog click ‘sort’ and hey presto we have a prioritised backlog.

Everyone embraces the outcome because: they participated, there was total transparency and we all bought into the goal for the coming quarter.

Finally I would present the prioritised backlog to the product council/steering group – in general it’s well accepted because either those present participated in its prioritisation or one of their subordinates was involved and reported back to them.

The quality of the prioritisation is directly related to the product manager’s ability to keep everyone on track, focused on the agreed goal as you vote on each backlog item.

Getting to the Top in Product Marketing and Product Management

I came across this video on Youtube and found it quite inspiring so I thought it was worth sharing.  The introduction on what is product management/marketing is quite succinct and bang on target.

Many of the points resonated with me especially the frequent referrals to the importance of the customer in developing your product offering.  Hope you enjoy :-).

Meet the Product Manager

What do you do when you’re a product manager (for web applications and tools) who has started a new job, assigned to an existing team who are just about to embark on the development of a range of new products and product features? We’ll whatever the correct answer is, this is what I have started to do. The first step I took was to review the situation and give the team the opportunity to voice their opinion.


I soon realized in my first week in my new role as product manager that there was plenty of scope to improve a number of aspects of the product development process. We are currently using a hybrid of Scrum and waterfall (the logic behind this will form the basis of a later blog post). I waited for all the team members’ to return from their holidays before holding a team meeting that I tagged “meet the product manager”.

I introduced myself as a product manager who ‘eats their own dog food’ – in other words I’m an active user of online tools, blogging platforms, social media and networking sites.

I also took the opportunity to let them know the things (from a professional perspective) that I’m passionate about:

• All things to do with Product Management/Marketing.
• Working with engineering/development teams and cross functional teams.
• Agile software development particularly, scrum.
• Creating strategy and visions and driving them through all the stages to completion.

The things that I’m not passionate about – in fact the things that we should, as a team, avoid at all cost. See the familiar cartoon strip below.

I followed this with a case study: comparing two redesign projects that I was the  product manager for.  One using waterfall which had a shared test resource and the other using scrum with a dedicated test resource. The results were alarming. The waterfall project took +60% more man hours and went live with 100 plus small and medium bugs, whilst the redesign, that was developed using scrum, went live with 4 known minor bugs. I used this experience not only to demonstrate my active involvement in scrum but to illustrate the type of transformational product development we can achieve if we work closely together and use the scrum frame work wisely.

I highlighted that as the scrum product owner I would initially be spending a lot of my time and energy  over the next 4 to 8 weeks, developing: in conjunction with the business owners, commercial owners and other senior stakeholders, the product strategy, product roadmap and release plan - the end result being a backlog with at least 6 to 18 months worth of work in it. Naturally the backlog would need constant grooming as coarse grain items become high priority.  I would also naturally be on hand on a day to day basis to support the team and work with the scrum master to remove impediments

I then handed out post-it notes and ask the team to write on each note their likes and dislikes and also to introduce themselves e.g. where they've previously worked, what they’re passionate about, hobbies and interests…

One of the key messages message that the scrum training drummed home to me when I was first trained on the scrum framework was that scrum does not solve problems it only identifies them. However scrum, if practiced appropriately, will make change and tracking and tracking the results of change much easier. Here are the top three likes and dislikes the developers highlighted.

Dislikes:

1. No dedicated  full time test analyst, not using  automated test tools; the team failing to carry out unit testing and code reviews.
2. Changing requirements /scope creep causing work to be either wasted or having to be reworked.
3. Opinions of the team not always being embraced when it comes to decisions on functionality.

Likes:

1. Knowledge sharing among the team – experience and ideas are traded freely.
2. The fact that we use scrum/agile – the team liked all aspects of scrum especially the ability to select tasks on a daily basis.
3. Product Manager being part of the team as opposed to being absent (note complement was aimed at the interim contract product manager cum technical team leader).

My job as product owner aka product manager in conjunction with the scrum master aka technical team lead – is to ensure that the team is empowered to change those things that we have the power to change. Understand and communicate the reasoning behind the things that we can’t change and be patient with the things that will take time to change.

I said to at the beginning of this blog post that the first thing was to review the situation and give the team the opportunity to share their thoughts – the second thing I’ll do (and publish the results in a future blog post) is to survey the team to see how mature they are with regards to practicing scrum.

Combining Classical and Agile Product Management

I was asked to present, at an interview, on how I see the role of the product manager working in an agile scrum environment. The key areas that I highlighted were:

• Scope and responsibilities of the product manager in scrum
• Typical product management activities in scrum
• A typical day in the life of the agile product manager
• The agile product management framework
• A case study – the benefits

See full presentation below.

However since the interview/presentation and starting in the new role the company has decided to change direction and combine waterfall with scrum. The idea is that we start off in waterfall mode move into scrum and then finish in waterfall.

Since joining the first thing I noticed was that the current scrum team is being led (as opposed to the team self managing itself) by a contract technical team lead cum product manager who spends part of his time being the scrum master and part being a business analysis.

In order to bring clarity and set expectations from the start I went about working with the head of development and head of product management to define, at a real granular level, the scope of the product manager aka product owner and that of the scrum master who is currently the technical team lead.

The end result was a list of 90+ activities: starting off with documenting the product vision and ending in the release of a sprint. The activities combine classical product management with agile product management – a real hybrid taking the best of both worlds. The roles and responsibilities matrix was signed off by both heads – now the journey begins.

Next week I meet with the development in order to explore the journey we’ll take together in developing the products allocated to us.

How I See The Role Of Product Management

View more presentations from Derek Morrison.

Product Management interview question on strategy and tactics

I was being interviewed for a Product Managers position by a Chief Operating Officer (COO) who used to do the job that I was interviewing for. The company has adopted and really embraced scrum so naturally expects the Product Manager to take on many of the Product Owners responsibilities. I ask the COO to broadly split the role down into three aspects. His reply was:
1. Vision and Strategy
2. Execution and delivery
3. Stakeholder management and collaboration

I jotted the above answer down on my note pad. He then asked me “what percentage of my time I think I would spend on each of the above three activities.” I paused for a second – gathered my thoughts and jotted figures next to each one:

1. Vision and Strategy – 20%
2. Execution and delivery – 40%
3. Stakeholder management and collaboration – 40%

Fortunately for me he agreed.

I often hear and read of Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers stressing at their yearly appraisals that they get too bogged down with the tactical and have no time for the strategic and visionary part of the job. The problem is that if you don’t use it (the visionary and strategic thinking) then your loose it. Amy C Edmondson in HBR puts it this way:

“Execution is difficult to sustain – not because people get tired of working hard, but because the managerial mindset-set that enables efficient execution inhibits employees’ ability to learn and innovate. A focus on getting things done, and done right, crowds out the experimentation and reflection vital to sustainable success”. Harvard Business Review July – Aug 08

Correct implementation of the Scrum process aims to solve the problem where the Product Managers/ Product Owners gets burned out due to “efficient execution” and a sharp focus of “getting things done” and “done right”. A Product Manager/Owner knows the cycles of the team and can therefore plan his/her work in advance. The key is to ensure that there is a well balanced Scrum team. I like the way Marty Cagan puts it:

“You will need product managers to represent the needs of your target users and lead the product discovery effort. You probably already have project managers (aka Scrum masters), but if not, you’ll need product managers too; just don’t make the mistake of trying to hire one person to cover project management and product management.” (italics supplied)

It’s important for each product person to deliberately carve out time for themselves to do activities that will be the catalysed for strategic and visionary thinking. Such activities would include (but not limited to): visiting customers, researching the marketing and competition, discussions with the development team on the latest and greatest technologies as well as discussions on how existing technologies can be used in an innovative way, looking at how other industries (current and past) have solved problems. When I led a team of product managers – I gave them one day a month to spend out of the office in order to research what ever they wanted – all I asked in return was for a one line explaining what they had discovered. The key is not to get distracted by too many tactical things – hence the one day out of the office: Tom Grant Forrester analysts expressed it this way:

“Product Managers need to focus on the strategic inbound tasks instead of being distracted by too many tactical demands… companies need to hire or cultivate product managers who have the skills and experiences necessary to produce high-quality product management deliverables – not something that anyone can do with out training”

Tom continues by identifying the benefits of ensuring that Product Managers spend quality time on vision and strategy activities:

“Companies that make these product management reforms will be more competitive and better able to use product management deliverables to make better strategic decisions.

In short it’s a win: win situation for both you and the company. So we product people need to take the time to develop ourselves and companies need to give us the time and ensure we have the band width to do it.