Product backlog management is a nuanced art form that requires relentless attention. As a product owner, it’s your responsibility to run a well-oiled machine and keep the product backlog healthy. This includes accommodating stakeholders, development teams, and most importantly, users. But how do you manage a product backlog in a way that is effective and results-driven?
Here are 7 tips from a seasoned agile product owner:
1. order the product backlog for clarity.
The order of the product backlog is top priority. It’s how you explain the intended path of execution to the development team and stakeholders, which is a moving target for a product owner. It also keeps you organized, makes finding and discussing product backlog items easier, and clears up what your target is ‘today.’ The question that then arises is, how do you determine the order?
The product owner backlog should be prioritized based on value, with the value being relative to the product under development.
2. focus on value above all else.
The cardinal rule is simple: if something fails to deliver value, it has no place in the product backlog. The backlog isn’t a repository for every passing idea but rather a curated selection of initiatives that bring tangible value. As a product owner, it falls upon you to substantiate the value of each item. A robust approach is to devise a system for estimating the business value of backlog items and adhere to it consistently.
3. understand dependencies to dodge impediments.
Dependencies on product backlog items, whether technical constraints or business decisions, are inevitable. It’s up to the product owner to be cognizant of dependencies to ensure fluid sprint planning sessions and help teams avoid impediments during a Sprint. One way to do this is by sticking to an appropriately ordered product backlog, as outlined in tip #1. Word to the wise: avoid the common pitfall of attempting to track every dependency with a tool, as it often proves to be more cumbersome than beneficial.
4. get feedback and reflect.
There are three constituent groups that a product owner must appease: the development team, stakeholders, and users. A product backlog must reflect the outcomes of conversations from each of these groups, and the product owner must be transparent about those outcomes. product owners should do the following:
- Engage the development team through structured backlog refinement sessions.
- Allocate time for engaging with pertinent stakeholders, actively seeking their input during Sprint Reviews.
- Employ creative methods to gain insight into customer perspectives.
Transparency is key to ensuring you’re heading down the right path in terms of what you’re developing, how you’re doing it, and for whom the product is being made.
5. embrace emergent requirements.
Requirements can emerge progressively, as opposed to being delineated upfront. There’s no large upfront requirements phase where we assume dark corners of a project have been discovered. Instead, we solicit a high-level list of requirements from the customer, prioritize them, and refine top-priority items as we progress.
Emergent requirements minimize upfront requirement-gathering efforts, allowing us to quickly and efficiently change course and mitigate the risk of making incorrect assumptions. Avoid diving into every detail of each requirement and please don’t end up regressing into an iterative waterfall. Likewise, remember a user story intends to be a conversation piece, not a contract.
6. acknowledge imperfect estimates.
The agile ethos advocates for a departure from exhaustive estimation exercises, given the inherent fallibility of human estimates. Instead, techniques like poker planning or affinity estimation allow development teams to quickly forecast a product backlog. This will help you to negotiate scope with the masses and will appease stakeholders with a date.
Estimating is an imperfect science, so don’t scorn the development team if things go awry. Instead, the focus should be directed toward early detection of deviations to facilitate timely course corrections.
7. implement layers of decomposition.
You need multiple layers of decomposition in your product backlog to have a high-level conversation about the state, scale across multiple teams, and focus on incremental delivery. Popular tools come built-in with the ability to do this.
Depending on your organization, terminology may vary but your layers of decomposition should include objective, feature, and user stories. Here’s an example:
Objective – Increase web checkout transactions by 5%
Feature (Epic) – Personalization
User Story – Retain Retaining Customer Credit Card Info
User Story – Frequent Visitor Discounts
Feature (Epic) – Expand Payment Options
User Story – Accept PayPal
User Story – Add Bitcoin
User Story – Gift Cards
These layers allow for easier conversations and give greater power in ordering a product backlog as ordering may happen at any layer. You also want to think of incremental delivery and do your best to deliver small chunks into production.
As a product owner at Randstad Digital, refining the backlog is a pivotal stride towards achieving incremental delivery and delivering a product that resonates with both your development team and your customers. Are you equipped to steer your development team through a Sprint towards tangible progress? Reach out to Randstad Digital today to leverage our expertise in enhancing your Agile development workflow.