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Backlog Prioritization

IPM

What is it?

A backlog refers to a prioritized list of tasks, features, or items that need to be addressed or implemented in a product. It serves as a dynamic repository for all potential work related to the product, including new features, enhancements, bug fixes, and technical debt.

Why do it?

A backlog is considerably more tactical than a roadmap since it tracks every feature, bug, chore, epic, and release for your product. Having a well managed backlog builds team alignment, tracks and visualizes progress, forecasts delivery, and fosters adaptations to changing needs and environments.

When to do it?

Once you have learned about your problem space, built a roadmap, and started writing the first couple stories it is time to organize everything into a backlog to begin prioritizing and tracking the team’s work.

Who to Involve?

Led by Product Managers and align with Designers, Engineers and stakeholders for consensus

Tools You Might Need

A Project Management and tracking tool like Jira, GitHub, Asana, Trello or a board like Miro.

prioritization

How to do it (Steps)

The steps to building a backlog involves several key steps to ensure that it accurately reflects the needs and priorities of stakeholders while providing a clear direction for the product development team. Here's a structured approach to building a backlog:

  1. Understand User Needs and Business Goals:

    • Gather the insights into the needs and preferences of your target users through methods such as user interviews, surveys, market research, and usability testing.
    • Align these user needs with the broader organizational goals and objectives to ensure that the product backlog supports the organization's strategic vision.

  2. Capture Requirements and Ideas:

    • Document all requirements, ideas, and potential features that emerge from user research, stakeholder feedback, market trends, competitive analysis, and internal discussions.
    • Use techniques such as user stories, feature requests, and use cases to capture these requirements in a structured format

  3. Prioritize Items:

    • Prioritize backlog items based on factors such as customer value, business impact, technical feasibility, dependencies, and strategic alignment.
    • Use prioritization frameworks like MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have), Kano model, or Value vs. Effort matrix to assess and rank items effectively.
    • Involve stakeholders, including customers, product managers, developers, designers, and other relevant team members, in the prioritization process to ensure alignment and consensus.

  4. Break Down Epics into Manageable Tasks:

    • For larger, high-level backlog items or epics, break them down into smaller, more manageable tasks or user stories.
    • Ensure that each user story follows the INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) to maintain clarity and effectiveness.

  5. Estimate Effort and Complexity:

    • Estimate the effort and complexity of each backlog item to help with planning and resource allocation.
    • Use techniques such as story points, t-shirt sizing, or relative sizing to provide a rough estimation of the effort required to complete each task or user story.

  6. Maintain Transparency and Visibility:

    • Keep the backlog visible and accessible to all stakeholders and team members.

  7. Iterate and Refine Continuously:

    • Regularly review and update the backlog based on feedback, changing priorities, new insights, and evolving requirements.
    • Conduct backlog grooming sessions or refinement meetings periodically to reassess priorities, remove outdated items, add new ones, and ensure that the backlog remains relevant and actionable.

Things to keep in mind:

Defining your backlog statuses and organizing work is a key first step, but there is a bit more to backlog management than simply tracking the progress of individual stories. Here are a few other areas to consider:

  • Study the analytics: Most backlog tools calculate your team’s Velocity (points delivered per iteration) and Volatility (deviation of velocity over time) along with a number of other useful metrics. Analytics can be enormously helpful for scoping releases, planning iterations, and understanding/improving team norms.

  • Use labels and blockers: It is helpful to categorize and sort information using labels or tags. Some backlog tools have specific features for epics and blockers, but in absence of those you can always use labels.

  • Roll up to your roadmap: Your backlog should reflect the outcomes and epics specified on your roadmap as closely as possible in order to minimize surprise work. If a major feature set or refactor pops into your backlog it is probably time to update your roadmap, or vice versa.

A backlog is designed to function as an organization and communication tool for the team, so be open to changing things around and experimenting to make it work as well as possible for your specific team. It is more important for a team to be aligned around a backlog and use it effectively than it is for you to implement your specific style of backlog. As with everything on a balanced team, you are consistently soliciting feedback from other disciplines to improve processes for everyone.