Maintaining a Healthy Backlog
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https://www.ricksoft-inc.com/
Intro:
What makes a product backlog so effective is its agile nature. Backlogs are in constant evolution, changing and adapting based on the current needs of stakeholders and customers. To keep a backlog up-to-date and in its most effective form, it needs to be continuously refined and adapted. This process takes time, but there are simple, powerful strategies for maintaining a quality backlog.
What is a healthy backlog?
Roman Pichler, the author of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love, developed DEEP to describe the key attributes of a good product backlog. The acronym DEEP helps product owners and development teams understand how to make smart decisions while maintaining a successful backlog.
The concept is applied throughout the product backlog refinement process, which is a critical part of backlog management. Backlog refinement, previously called backlog grooming, is an ongoing process that ensures a backlog is in tip-top shape. We like to think of it as trimming the branches of a plant.
To help a plant grow, you need to prune and trim it. The refinement process adds details where needed and prioritizes items based on the current information a product owner has from team members and stakeholders.
DEEP stands for Detailed appropriately, Estimated, Emergent, and Prioritised.
Following these guidelines and best practices will lead to a quality backlog, which will lead to smooth product development and a successful end result.
So what’s to be done to maintain and keep our backlog healthy? Here are some selected tips that really help!
Start with the end in mind
To ensure proper product backlog management, you need to make sure that there is a clear product vision in place, translated into product strategy, and well-defined product goals.
Product strategy usually involves positioning, market opportunities research, target customers, competitors’ analysis, etc. It describes customers’ needs and how you plan to satisfy those needs. Based on the overall product strategy, the product manager and product owner should agree on a product vision that will guide prioritizing the backlog. It should clearly state the key benefits for the customer, and how the product is differentiated from the competition.
Visualize & Review the timeline
A simple but powerful timeline is the best way to visualize the overall strategy for your product. We can consider the timeline as the “foundation” of successful backlog management. There are many helpful tools for visualizing timelines.
Review and adjust it regularly. Changes are likely to occur frequently. Try to update the timeline every 3 weeks to every 3 months, depending on your own release cycles.
Set priorities
Prioritization is the key point in backlog management and should be clearly aligned with the mutually agreed upon product vision and KPIs.
Available prioritization methodologies and popular frameworks will assist you in ordering the ideas and plan iterations more easily. The Value vs Efforts matrix is a great tool.
Comparing the combination of Value and Effort in each task, you’ll prioritize the tasks better and choose the most important of them for development.
Schedule refinement meetings
Regular refinement meetings help to keep your product backlog healthy. Refinement is critical as it increases the chances of creating a product that adds real value to the users.
During the refinement, you can add details, estimates, and prioritization to the product items. This requires collaborative work between the product owner and developers. The product backlog is built based on discussion rather than documentation. The refinement should not cover more than 10% of the working time of developers.
Improve collaboration
Successful backlog management means consistent and frequent collaboration between product managers and the development team. Encourage your team to participate in backlog discussions, and ask questions. This will increase their understanding, increase the buy-in of everyone, and ultimately lead to clearer requirements.
Provide visibility and transparency
Though the owner of the backlog is the Product Owner, who is responsible for collecting user feedback and driving product development, all team members must have access to it and be able to add ideas. Scrum team members should keep technical debt in mind and add suggestions on how to pay it back. When all team members can contribute, the application can benefit from everyone’s areas of expertise.
Final notes:
Not having a good backlog impacts many team activities.
Starting with ambiguity in terms of release planning – or planning ahead and moving to identifying dependencies – particularly technical risks or ensuring that the delivered solutions meet the users’ expectations could all cause surprises and delays.
By focusing on a good, healthy backlog, teams can focus on ensuring a smooth and fast flow to the value of the backlog items while steadily improving their own effectiveness.
Resources:
https://www.easyagile.com/blog/product-backlog/
https://280group.com/product-management-blog/product-backlog-management-product-managers/
https://www.dragonspears.com/blog/maintaining-a-healthy-product-backlog-in-agile
https://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/5-dimensions-healthy-backlog/