HOW TO CONSIDER NEW IDEAS IN THE PRODUCT BACKLOG

Before you aggregate items in the Product Backlog, you must consider all the possibilities to receive new ideas for the product. You may have different fonts to receive ideas or inspiration to find a new one and you must collect these ideas in one only repository that allows having visibility and management of all that you can insert in the Product Roadmap.

To collect ideas, you can grant permissions on the repository to allow your team and stakeholders to push new items, but the best way is to have ongoing conversations with them and your users. It is a winner to have at least one conversation per week with the sales force/users to gather new ideas or requirements from them. Also, at least one conversation per month with the team and the stakeholders about new ideas.

You can call it an idea´s repository or an idea’s bank, but the important thing is to have the ability to hear all the time what these fonts say to you about the product and collect it appropriately to analyze after.

One way to collect appropriately new ideas is to collect context information for this idea, when you hear a new one, you should think in:

·        ¿Who mentions the idea?

·        ¿What user problem or pain could the idea solve?

·        ¿How the idea solves it?

·        ¿What is the value that the idea aggregate to the product?

·        ¿Do the idea aggregate massive value or only for one user?

·        ¿Is the Idea accurate with the product type and its current vision?

When you have that information about the ideas that you could receive, you could analyze, include them in the Product Roadmap and prioritize these ideas according to the data. With this data the idea won't be only a title, would be a premise with arguments.

After that, you must think according to these data, which ideas have consistency and coherency with the product. Which of them should pass to the next step. And the next step when you have a filtered list is to answer these questions. ¿Is the idea viable? ¿How big will be the development effort? ¿How big will be its costs? ¿Will, the user pay for it? ¿Will the idea be profitable?

Only when you have this information can you decide in a precise way what ideas should be on the product roadmap or not. You should consider in your product roadmap only ideas that present a real opportunity to improve or evolve your product; for example, something that is unprofitable does not represent a good opportunity, but you must analyze the profitability not only in money that you receive directly from the client, you must also think in other things like user engagement or in cost reductions for example.

With the ideas in your Roadmap, you need to prioritize which of them need to be included in the Product Backlog for the MVP or the Product version that you are working on. And one way to decide which are is to discuss the collected data of each idea with the team and the stakeholders. One way to have this discussion is using a template where they visualize this information and help them to select or choose their priorities suggestions in a quantitative way.

In the example of Figure1, this template shows some relevant information that is collected by the Product Manager, or the Product Lead and he provides to the stakeholders and the team to have more than the intuition to assign the priority for each item. It is possible to use this kind of template to work with the stakeholders and the team in a meeting or to work individually and then consolidate and converge. The most important is that the priority is a consensus, based on data, not only on the intuition for one person.

The next step when you have a prioritized backlog is to create or refine your Release plan and define what will be the first items that must design and covert in user stories to be included in the next sprints.

David Zuluaga Ramírez.