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Product management

14th March 2021 by Ben Barden

Practical tips for organising your backlog, from my home improvement project

For the last two weeks, I’ve had a bit of a break from blogging while moving into my new home. This week, I’d like to write about taking a backlog of work or ideas and getting them organised and ordered.

However, instead of talking about software projects, I’m going to use my recent move as the example. Since moving in, there’s lots of things I want to with the place — so it makes sense to organise these into some kind of order.

What you need:

  • Post-it notes, Sharpie pens, Whiteboard, whiteboard markers
  • Or, a suitable digital alternative

Step 1: Get the ideas written down

First, we write down everything we want to do.

Grab a stack of post-it notes and a Sharpie (per person) and start writing things down. Stick to one idea per post-it note. Keep the text brief.

You can use online tools to achieve a similar effect — particularly while we are working from home, but also if anyone in your group is working remotely.

With several people involved, you may want to timebox the task to 5–10 minutes, or you’ll have more ideas than you can realistically handle.

Step 2: Review and rank the ideas

First, read all of the items and see if they make sense. Are any of them too broad or too big?

For instance, “electrical work” would be too broad of an idea for the things I’d like to do in my flat. Instead, I can break this down into a few specific things — replace fuse box, add new plug sockets, replace socket covers, replace light fittings, and so on. Or, these could be broken down further — replace light fitting in lounge, replace pull cord in bathroom, replace light switch cover in lounge, and so on.

Look out for any duplicates and stack those together. Then, you can rank the ideas.

There are a few ways to do this. Giving each person 3–6 votes and taking the items with the most votes is fine if you don’t have dependencies, or if there’s not already a natural order — i.e. things that you want to do above anything else — or things you have to do.

You can use “MoSCoW” — i.e. Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have — to rank which tasks by order of importance.

Or you could do what I did and simply use High, Medium, or Low.

Step 3: Order the ideas

If you have a lot of ideas, you might not get to all of them yet. Start with the ideas with the most votes, or those that are the highest ranked.

Some things can be done in parallel, while others might have to be done before others — or you might want to push a few important things to the top. In a new home, safety is very important, but then so is heating, which might include replacing the windows, or getting new radiators. An electrician could do lots of small things in one day, but it’s probably better to focus on addressing any potential hazards before making the light switch covers look nicer.

The ranking of ideas will help, but the highest priority ideas might not be the ones you can do first. Replacing the windows in my flat is something I’d like to do right now, but there’s a lead time of a few months. The job is all booked in — but I can do other things in the meantime.

To actually write up the order, I titled up 3 columns on a whiteboard:

  • To do
  • Next up
  • In progress

For each task I’d like to do next, I’ve put them in the “Next up” column, in the order I’d like to do them. As a task gets underway, I move it to the “In progress” column. Other ideas I’d like to do soon, but which aren’t top priority, go into “To do” for the time being.

I’ve decided not to have a “Done” column — instead, when a task is done, I add it to a Google doc that lists out everything I’ve completed so far. And I’ll take the post-it note off the board at this point, freeing up space for other tasks.

You might find you have more tasks than you can fit on the board — and that’s fine — you can set them to one side for now. I’d recommend writing these up somewhere, either keeping them in the backlog of your issue tracker, or keeping a short list documented in Google Docs or Sheets.

Step 4: Keeping the board up to date

In a previous post, I explained that the Agile board should reflect reality. It’s all very well to get things in a nice order, but you need to keep the board up to date, too.

That means:

  • moving things to In progress when work starts;
  • moving things to Next up when space frees up;
  • changing the order of tasks as required;
  • adding more things to the To do column as space frees up.

While you can (and probably will!) do this in digital tools, there is a lot to be said in having a physical board. Moving a post-it between columns can feel good — seriously, try it! — I’d say it feels better than moving things around in something like Asana or Jira.

Having limited space is similar to a WIP limit, but it’s much harder to circumvent when you physically don’t have any more room for post-it notes. I guess you could get a bigger whiteboard — or a second one. I will admit to having just bought my second, although they will be used for different things.

This isn’t a particularly new or groundbreaking process, but keeping my home improvement ideas organised in this way has helped me to feel more on top of them, and to see progress being made. It’s very rewarding, and I’d recommend trying something like this for any project you do — tech or otherwise.

In 2021, I’m trying to write more regularly on my blog – hopefully one post per week. See my progress so far here: Weekly blogging in 2021

Filed Under: Agile, Product management, Project management

3rd April 2016 by Ben Barden

Redesigning City A.M. – March 2016

Summary

On 15th March 2016, we released a brand new look for cityam.com. In this post I’ll be digging into the what and why of the redesign.

[Read more…] about Redesigning City A.M. – March 2016

Filed Under: Product management, Project management Tagged With: city am, redesign, user experience

22nd March 2016 by Ben Barden

How I prioritise small requests alongside project work

Recently, I changed the way I prioritise new work requests and projects. Here’s what I’ve started doing.

Prioritising the product backlog

JIRA is our central system for development requests. There’s one project for smaller requests: the “BAU” as I call it, which is anything that takes 2 days dev time or less. Except for urgent requests, which we will drop other work to look at, anything in JIRA is allocated a business area via a custom field.

Each week, I export a list of all open tickets, filtered by area. One or two people in each area indicate their Priority 1 and Priority 2 tasks, and those go into the queue. We also prioritise our internal work, such as changes to the core product, and improvements to our technical stack.

We won’t complete all of the prioritised tasks every week – but it allows us to see what the priorities are.

I believe it’s important for all areas of the business to be included in the prioritisation process. Nobody should feel that their area is being ignored. Allowing each business owner to define their priorities can prevent this issue.

Prioritising the projects

Instead of starting yet another spreadsheet, for projects I decided to use pen and paper. I ordered a stack of 1000 plain white 5×3 record cards and a pack of Sharpies.

I started by writing one project on each card, and laying it all out on the table (literally). Staff involved in the meeting can see all the known projects, ask what they are, and identify anything that may be missing.

Once all projects are defined, we agree what’s the next priority. This makes it very clear which project will be worked on next – and also what won’t be. Showing the number of projects can make it very clear if there’s a capacity issue. There’s only so much resource, so we can’t work on every project simultaneously.

Does it work?

As this is a very new process I’m trialling, it’s too early to say how effective it is. I’ll write a follow-up post on this.

Filed Under: Product management, Project management

10th January 2016 by Ben Barden

6 pitfalls with user feedback

Getting feedback from users can be an invaluable way to determine how your product is viewed by its audience. But it’s important to understand some of the pitfalls with user feedback before you start allowing comments to shape your product strategy.

1. Not everyone likes change

There’s a running joke that whenever Facebook changes something, people are up in arms for a week or two – maybe not even that. After that initial period, we get used to the change. Sometimes, negative feedback may be purely down to the fact we don’t like change. If you’re going to ask for feedback, don’t do it immediately after a big release.

2. People are more likely to give negative feedback

Negative feedback can be a good way to measure if a recent change has annoyed users. Unfortunately, a lot of people won’t give any feedback at all – including those who are happy with a change. Don’t take negative feedback to mean you need to reverse a recent change.

3. One-off comments may not help anyone else

If one person asks for something, don’t jump on that task immediately. If it’s a good idea and you can make a change as a result of their feedback, it’s something to consider. However, if you react to every comment without considering if it’s right for the product, you may end up with a product with a sprawling feature set, and that pleases an extremely narrow group of users – the most vocal ones.

4. New designs need time to bed in

A new design can attract a lot of comments – most of them are purely down to opinion. Issues such as elements overlapping, fonts being too small, or scaling not working across different screen sizes are important things to fix. Beyond that, aesthetics shouldn’t be up for debate.

5. People don’t know what they want

If you ask 100 users of your product what they want from it, the collective feedback may be a laundry list of missing features. In fact, your best change could be something that nobody even thought of. You are in control of product strategy – find things that people didn’t even know they wanted. Make the product quicker and easier to use.

6. Surveys can help – but be careful what you wish for

A user feedback survey can give you a limited set of feedback on the questions of your choosing. But don’t ask for things you don’t want to do. “Should we build an app?” is a pointless question if you have no intention of building one.

Filed Under: Product management Tagged With: product strategy, user feedback

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