Hands-on approach to backlog prioritisation
By: Tagui Manukian
Tags: Product, Product Development, Technology, Product Management, Business

Hands-on approach to backlog prioritisation

Source: unsplash.com

The way we organise our backlog has a direct influence on the progress and how we handle unknown within a given timeframe.

What are the benefits associated with organised and prioritised backlog and how it can help you?

it makes you more confident in the bets you are ready to commit to

in the bets you are ready to commit to it makes you faster because you have option B, C and even D

because you have option B, C and even D it makes you flexible because you know what can come next

because you know what can come next it makes you calmer because you can better manage uncertainty

There are well-known techniques for the backlog prioritisation such as “Moscow”, “Kano”, “Ranking” , “User story mapping” and many others. But those are more applicable to the products that just start on the market. For the well-formed products they show some disadvantages. They are broad and generic and they don’t cope with a group of smaller, close with impact initiatives.

In the survey I ran with more than 50 product managers, 35,3% of the participants said that they need to improve on their prioritisation skills.

Moreover, another survey with engineers showed that prioritisation skills are in top 5 skills that developers find the most important in a product manager.

Start with the problem you are solving

Yes, we heard it many times: “put the user problem first”. I have to repeat it — “Put the user problem first”.

What does it mean in this case?

Before you get to the backlog identify what problem you and your team are willing to solve.

My company works in cycles, so every cycle we define a big topics within which we want to solve user problems.

This gives all of us a clear identification of what we want to focus on and how we can measure the success. In other words we get OKRs done. As pragmatic and practical as it may sound, but having an Objective and Key Results to measure it helps. It brings so much clarity and alignment making everyone feel on the same boat and ready to conquer a new target.

Compile a list of ideas

These ideas may not necessarily be new, they might be left from the previous cycle or beginning of the year.

Doesn’t matter.

As long as they solve your user problem, you should include them in the list.

Every team has a different approach to creating that list. In my team developers are involved from the beginning, it makes them feel as close to the product and the users as possible. And in the end of the day, they know the product the best. They build it. Additionally we are practicing curiosity and excitement to take the product to a different level. As famous filmmaker James Cameron said, “Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own.” We try to live it up in the team.

We run ideation sessions where we produce ideas within the given OKRs.

Then we vote and identify a set of best ideas that both help solve the user problem and meet business target. One doesn’t go without the other.

Put your ideas into the good old Excel

I know Excel doesn’t seem to be the most exciting tool, but it definitely serves the purpose.

In this case I will show a step by step approach on the prioritisation methodology that I use myself and I usually do it in the Excel, but if you have a better alternative where you can replicate the same logic, then go ahead and use it.

I transfer our ideas in the file and combine them with the old ideas that target the same user problem. In the example below you can find made-up ideas to demonstrate you how it works.

Table with ideas and respective user problem and solution

For every idea I take the time to properly write the user problem.

We tend to jump directly into solutions, when we should spend 90% of the time properly formulating the user problem.

What does properly mean?

It means a clear statement with a user pain/need and data to back that up.

You must be thinking “…finding data will take so much time. It is obvious that we have that problem, our users mention it all the time”. No, that is a poor statement and to get the devotion and commitment of the team you have to convince yourself to open an analytical tool and find the data to prove your argument. That will also give you more confidence in your hypothesis.

The most important part: assess every idea on the OKR level

It is not a secret that businesses run on money. And it concerns everyone in the company. Everyone.

After we put the user first, now comes the time to make sure that business is also benefiting from our initiatives.

A way that I found to do it is to break down your OKRs into columns. Let’s say you have 2 key results:

to increase the number of registered users

and the number of sessions from active users.

So in this case two key metrics you want to look into are registrations and active sessions. Now you are going to evaluate each idea/initiative that you have based on these two metrics by giving “yes” or “no” in the respective cells.

Screen ideas on the two main metrics, use “yes” & “no” to indicate the impact

Side note: if you are willing to have more precision, instead of “yes” or “no” you can use numerical estimations and then normalise those values for prioritisation.

Sure enough, in a bigger company or bigger team you might end up having a lot more metrics that 2. This method can help you in the struggle of prioritising ideas when you have a big set of metrics to look into.

Once you evaluated whether ideas meet the dedicated key results (KRs), make a column where you count the number of KR matches for each idea. Set up a formula to counts “yes” cells.

Consider other factors and include them in the table

OKRs are important, but they are not everything. There are also other key metrics that are hard to put into numbers but they play an essential role, therefore having them in your prioritisation is important.

Or there might be UX related indicators that are also vital for the success of the product.

Adding user experience and user value to the table

Therefore, we need to enrich our table with additional metrics: -user experience, -user value.

I ask myself “Does this improve the user experience?” or “Does this have a positive impact on the usability of the product/feature?”. And I use “yes” and “no” to screen the list of ideas on user experience metric.

Assessment on user value by the team of developers

For the last one — user value — I like to dig deeper.

I involve the team.

How?

By setting up a survey where ideas we had are listed and I ask the team to assess those ideas in terms of user value by choosing between high, medium and low. I aggregate the answers and turn average scores into classification of high, medium and low.

By including more people, people who are close to the product, we make our judgements more objective and less biased.

Get ready for a BIG formula

It might seem complex in the beginning, but once you get into it, it becomes clearer.

We now need to bring all the factors together and identify the confidence level.

How confident we can be that a specific idea will meet the business targets, increase the user value and improve the user experience.

And the range goes from high to low.

Confidence level formula consists of the IFS and AND clauses where all the factors are taken into account.

matching the OKRs

user experience

user value

Combinations of values of those metrics result into confidence level ranking from “high” to “low”. Here is how the formula looks like.