The need for keeping the lights on (maintaining your existing product) and being ambitious with enhancements (pushing the boundaries) requires an exercise in prioritization that any all product managers do at some stage.
We recently walked through an exercise to define and agree to a ‘Value’ for each of our Enhancements. Cost and risks are the other side of the equation, however usually we can easily guesstimate costs as compared to the value. Hence the following piece of information is geared more towards the ‘value/benefit’ conversation.
We realized Value should be two aspects —
- Value — i.e. revenue, efficiency, etc
- Impact — number of users impacted
Once this is done, we’d be able to get to an approach/order to define > build.
Ways to guesstimate the ‘value’ of a feature -
- Desirability — does anyone want it? how many users want this? which kind of ‘user segment’ wants it?
- Number of users using it / will get impacted
- Types of users using it / targeted user profile
- Estimated Revenue
- Client acquisition / user growth
- Client engagement / retention
- Performance / efficiency / reduce time etc.
Sequencing of work (when everything needs to get done) -
- Quick wins
- Time and Dependencies (any hard set deadlines?, backend / frontend resource availability, features that require more analysis upfront, design heavy, dependent on other teams’ backlog etc.)
- Features targeted to a revenue metric
- Features affecting the most large/impactful user population (profile)
- Features that align with the theme of the roadmap for the next quarter/year
Maintenance
Maintenance and technical debt comes in many shapes and sizes. Here are a few of the examples —
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Training
- Defect backlog — reduce by ~80%
- Other technical debt
How do we combine Enhancements & Maintenance into a single backlog?
Combining the enhancements with Maintenance items — when to do these, and how to factor into roadmap from above — how do we balance out Enhancements with Maintenance items.
- Correlations & Efficiencies — Identify where it makes sense to do things (enhancements and maintenance) together to gain efficiencies. eg. A + B create greater impact or when defects belonging to the same feature can be fixed along with an enhancement of that feature.
- Grouping into Themes for the quarter/year (eg. Engagement and Performance might be the biggest themes for next FY)
- % division between enhancements and defects
- Timelines (if any date has been hard set or if it impacts any financial season)
- Desirability (how much the debt/enhancement is being requested for)
- Other factors such as Business value, Customer value, Cost etc.
End Outcome
- Prioritized list of enhancements — based on criteria above
- Single roadmap of Enhancements and Maintenance Items — how to blend the two together, and what makes sense based on what we know
- Items broken down into Quarterly focus points — we might not have exact estimates, but we could guesstimate a lot of these to make an educated starting point
This roadmap becomes a starting point to accurately understand what we need to focus on and order of backlog.
