What Daily Backlog Prioritization Tasks Should A PO/PM Handle?
Product Backlogs in Agile help teams prioritise their work for better productivity. Product Owners focus on managing and priroritizing the product backlog to ensure that a Scrum team works efficiently, whereas the Product Manager focuses on the overall product strategy, customer needs, and roadmap planning, ensuring that development aligns with the overall product vision.
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Who is a POPM?
A Product Owner (PO) and Product Manager (PM) are professionals who ensure that product development in Agile happens smoothly and efficiently. The PO takes ownership of the product and is responsible for backlog management, prioritisation of tasks, writing user stories, and ensuring that there are valuable product increments. The PM oversees the product's journey and is responsible for defining the product’s vision, creating the product roadmap, and developing the marketing strategy for it.
What is a Product Backlog?
A Product Backlog is a list of all the items that need to be worked on in a product. This includes bugs, features, and glitches. This list helps agile teams determine the amount of work that can be completed in each sprint to ensure that business requirements are met.
Why is Backlog Prioritisation Important?
Backlog prioritisation ensures that the tasks of the greatest business or customer value are worked on first. It helps teams effectively manage their time and resources so that a project progresses smoothly and so that important features are delivered first.
Why Should a POPM Review the Backlog Regularly?
A Product Owner / Product Manager should prioritise the backlog regularly so that tasks align with shifting market, business, and customer needs. This helps ensure that teams focus on important tasks to ensure efficient product delivery.
What Backlog Tasks Should a POPM Handle?
Review Business Priorities
It is important for a product owner/product manager to continuously review business priorities so that the backlog remains updated with tasks of highest business value. This includes:
- Reviewing deadlines and commitments.
- Identifying new business requirements or dependencies.
- Ensuring that high-priority items on the existing backlog still support current business requirements.
Clarify New Business Requirements
A POPM needs to ensure that the new requirements are communicated to their team and stakeholders to ensure that everyone aligns on the same task requirements.
Implement Feedback
Backlog prioritisation depends heavily on the feedback that a product receives from customers and stakeholders. A POPM must evaluate this feedback while prioritising tasks in the backlog so that features with the highest user requirements are delivered first.
Identify Dependencies
Changing business priorities may introduce high-priority work items that cannot be assessed immediately, especially if another task needs to be completed first. A POPM must identify incoming dependencies that may arise between teams, stakeholders, and external vendors so that priorities can be adjusted accordingly and teams will not have to assess tasks that cannot be developed at that moment.
Remove Irrelevant and Completed Tasks
One of the most important backlog prioritisation tasks of a POPM is to ensure the removal of work items that do not align with the product’s vision. They should also ensure that completed tasks and work items that cannot be developed are also removed from the list.
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What Are Some Techniques to Prioritise the Backlog?
MoSCoW
This product backlog management technique helps divide work items into four categories based on their value:
- Must Have
- Should Have
- Could Have
- Won’t Have (at the moment)
RICE
This prioritisation methodology ranks work items through data-driven scores. It evaluates tasks based on these metrics:
- Reach: The estimated number of customers that a product may reach during a specific time frame.
- Impact: The impact that a product may have. This can be determined based on a specific goal the product attempts to achieve. For instance, customer conversion or customer satisfaction.
- Confidence: This criterion determines the confidence of a certain estimate, such as the reach or impact.
- Estimate: This is the estimate of the total amount of resources, such as time and team members, that will be needed to complete a task
Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)
The WSJF prioritisation model is used by the Scaled Agile Framework to rank work items based on the highest business value. The WSJF value is calculated by dividing the cost of delay (based on the revenue the tasks bring, the value they hold, and possible risks) by the job size (which reflects the complexity of the task and the duration it might take to complete).
Conclusion
The POPM plays an important role in ensuring that the product backlog is maintained and regularly updated. This ensures that the task list aligns with relevant business requirements, reflects feedback, and acknowledges the dependencies that may arise as a result of new organizational needs.
A well-organized task list ensures that the team has a clear understanding of the work that needs to be prioritised and completed. This facilitates smoother product development within the Agile framework.