Practice of Product — Weekly Digest #1
Hi there busy Product {Manager, Owner}, I hope you had a weekend worthy of the name. This week, I’ve curated 3 articles to help you rethink product discovery, start setting spring goals (if you don’t already) and explore a transparent, multi-criteria approach to prioritize your Product backlog.
The Baby Bias — or How Not to Start Product Discovery
No one would tell you your baby is ugly. This article elucidates on that reality and how it could bias your product discovery process. Flipping the lean startup’s build-measure-lean cycle, an alternate learn-measure-build cycle is proposed where the recommendation is to “talk to your target audience as early as possible, in the most unbiased way possible, to make sure you are creating a solution to a real problem”.
Crafting Sprint Goals
If you’re a Scrum practitioner, you’d know how important the Sprint goal is within the Scrum framework — “It provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment”. The reality is that team sometimes struggles to set sprint goals and end up coasting from sprint to sprint working on Backlog Items without an end goal. This article reiterates the valuable role of Sprint goals in the Scrum framework, explores reasons teams may struggle to set Sprint goals and concludes with clear suggestions on how to start (or resume) Sprint goal setting.
A method for prioritizing your backlog
As any honest PM/PO will admit, prioritizing features or backlog items isn’t exactly the easiest of tasks. This article introduces an approach based on the the Weighted Shortest Job First method and provides practical examples of how to apply it in realistic scenarios. I especially like multi-criteria input to the method which considers Business value, Urgency, Opportunity and Development effort. These criteria play a big role in daily work especially if you PM a Product with cross-functional stakeholders and therefore competing ideas of what's valuable.