Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love by Pichler Roman

Author:Pichler, Roman...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-06-12T21:39:34.143000+00:00

Table 3.1. Sample Product Backlog

The themes in Table 3.1 contain coarse-grained items. Over time, these are decomposed into more detailed items. As the team estimates items, their size is recorded. Note that you can employ the structure in Table 3.1 independently of your product backlog tool, for instance, by appropriately arranging paper cards on a pin board, whiteboard, or the office wall.

Prioritizing the Product Backlog

I’ll never forget the day when I suggested to the product manager of a new health-care product to prioritize the use case pile in front of her. She looked at me, her eyes widening, and replied, “I can’t. They are all high-priority.”

Prioritization requires deciding how important an item is. If everything is high-priority, everything is equally important. This means in effect that nothing is a priority, so there is only a slim chance of delivering what the customer really needs. It’s the product owner’s responsibility to ensure that the product backlog is prioritized. Like the other grooming activities, prioritization is best carried out by the entire Scrum team. This leverages the team’s collective knowledge and generates buy-in.

Prioritization directs the team’s work by focusing the team on the most important items. It also freezes the backlog contents progressively. As mentioned before, items are detailed according to their priority. This builds flexibility into the process and allows delaying decisions about the lower-priority items, buying the Scrum team more time to evaluate options, gather feedback from customers, and acquire more knowledge. This ultimately results in better decisions and a better product.2

2 Delaying decisions until they have to be made is also referred to as the last responsible moment (Poppendieck 2003).

Since individual product backlog items can be very small and therefore difficult to prioritize, it’s useful to prioritize themes first. We then prioritize the items within and, if necessary, across themes. The remainder of this section explores the following factors in prioritizing the product backlog: value; knowledge, uncertainty, and risk; releasability; and dependencies.

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