What's your process for refining product backlog in agile development?

Product vision can be clearly defined with three different questions: What your product delivers? Whom you are targeting for? and How it is different from other products and solve the pain points? If you get an answer for all these and you are on the same direction. Your Product Vision is clear.

In the realm of product development, creating a compelling vision starts with strategic questioning and thorough product discovery. A powerful and well-crafted product vision should: - Set a firm foundation for the project. - Value customers' needs. - Align with the company's mission. - Fuel differentiation in the market. - Propel the team, fostering innovation while remaining achievable. - Enable the establishment of more granular product goals. In essence, it should encompass the following: - Clear purpose. - Defined target audience. - Differentiation from existing solutions. -Benefits to customers or stakeholders. - Inspire and motivate.

What's a product vision, you ask? It's like the heart and soul of our project, encapsulated in a single sentence. It tells us why we're doing this and who's going to benefit from it. It should consist of - Target Audience, Key Benefits, Differentiation and Impact Product Vision Template - "To [verb] [target audience] with [key benefit(s)] that [differentiation] and [impact]." Example of the financial institution's Product Vision "To empower small business owners with intuitive financial management tools that simplify their operations and drive financial growth."

Additionally, in my opinion, the “Vision” also relates to the Strategy, and implies where you want the Product to be and what it would be able to achieve at the end of defined time intervals which is why a Product Roadmap helps support the Product vision to a great extent.

Often, you will have multiple features that need attention, and a clear product vision makes it significantly easier to prioritise what work to pick up next.

Product backlog refinement is an ongoing process of ensuring that the product backlog is clear, concise, and prioritized. This involves logically breaking down more complex stories into smaller, more manageable tasks for estimating effort and assigning priorities. The end result of refinement must be a backlog that is ready for the development team to pull from during sprint planning and to provide respective estimates.

As part of product backlog refinement, it is essential to understand the pain points and needs of your end users and customers. That helps you define and prioritize your backlog while providing maximum business value. While understanding the customer problem, assessing technical feasibility and complexity is crucial to identifying the right solution among your options. Understanding the different needs based on your target customer segments is another key takeaway as part of refining the backlog. Gathering customer feedback from the delivered product capabilities will help define the roadmap forward.

Let's turn our attention to our real stars – our users. User Personas: These are like our user besties, created from research, interviews, and empathy maps. They give us a vivid picture of our ideal customers, helping us understand what makes them tick. User Stories: Imagine little notes from our users telling us what they want. These are concise descriptions of features or functions, all written from the user's viewpoint. It's like having a direct conversation with them, shaping our product based on their needs. With user personas and stories, we're not just building a product; we're crafting an experience that's perfect for our users."

User Story mapping has been a technique that has helped me in defining the user persona and use cases, the jobs to be done for each persona and to break them down into stories. To start with I would define the user persona and the jobs to be done and perform a whiteboard activity/workshop with my teams to communicate this construct and together to break them down to user stories.

User stories are simple yet powerful. They follow a template like "As a [user persona], I want [action] so that [benefit]." For example, "As a busy parent, I want one-click grocery shopping so that I can save time and feed my family quickly." Why This Matters 🌟 User personas and stories are your agile super-tools. They're the bridge between your product vision and what actually gets built. They keep everyone on the same page and ensure your product aligns with your users' needs.

All right, now that we've got our user personas and their stories laid out, it's time to make some smart choices. Prioritization: We're talking about ranking our backlog items based on their importance, urgency, and how they connect. We've got nifty frameworks like MoSCoW, RICE, or Kano to help us with this. Estimation: Now, let's talk about sizing things up. We're not measuring in inches or feet but in terms of effort, risk, or uncertainty. We use techniques like planning poker (not the card game), t-shirt sizes, or even the Fibonacci sequence to get a handle on this. With prioritization and estimation, we're not just randomly picking tasks; we're making well-informed choices about what's on our plate and how big each portion should be.

I think this step varies depending on which methodology you’re using. For eg. Kanban requires more frequent prioritisation. The estimation in such a case is not just useful but also urgent as the concept of sprint is blurred. Writing a user story and knowing how it could translate into code gives me a balanced view of the product. So when I prioritise the backlog, I think of the user. But when I estimate complexity, I think of the developer. And I use this combined knowledge to rank the PBIs while keeping in mind business goals. All in a day’s work!

As an Agile Team product owner, I have set my team up to have a rolling analysis of the upcoming work. In the first sprint, the BA breaks the work into user stories and presents it to the team. In the following sprint, sprint 2, the developers will do technical analysis of the user stories. In sprint 3, the developers will present their tech analysis to the team for discussion and sizing. Assuming no outstanding issues are to be addressed, the stories are ready to be pulled into the sprint based on the effort and priority of each story. This method ensures that, as a PO, I can more easily prioritise the backlog items.

Prioritization is critically important because it allows you to layout the roadmap and blueprint for how the product should be built. Without it, your product may never come to life because no one will know what to work on next. Try using a Now/Next/Later approach in prioritizing your backlog and establishing a high level roadmap. Then work to prioritize the epics/ features within each of the categories, with an emphasis on Now so you can guide the team to build the features needed in the right order.

I want my team to have fun while working, so I use Collaborative Play, which make this process a collaborative and engaging activity, similar to a board game. Team members can physically place user stories on the matrix and discuss their rationale, using the complexity and value cards. This approach not only prioritises and estimates but also promotes discussions and shared decision-making. By gamifying the prioritisation and estimation process, you engage the team in deeper discussions about the nuances of each backlog item. This method can reveal unique insights and foster alignment because it encourages team members to think holistically about the value and effort associated with each feature or user story.

I use a monthly backlog grooming meeting as an opportunity to get input from the wider team, but it's far from the only time that grooming happens. Weekly meetings and Teams chats are great for sharing user insights and new stories for quick discussion with my colleagues. And I write and refine stories on a daily basis. Calendars and ceremonies should be tools to support your work, not barriers that constrain it.

You need to constantly check dependencies and priorities, as these may fluctuate. It's also essential to keep the backlog concise and to remove stories that will not add value. For example, I often remove smaller enhancement requests if it was raised months ago but haven't been mentioned by stakeholders since. In my mind, it's clearly not a priority. If they bring it up again, I can add it back on the backlog, but mostly...they don't. A cluttered backlog makes for a cluttered mind. It's much easier to prioritise 70 items than 700 items.

Iterating and refining is a concept that all great product goes through, and that extends to the product backlog. Things can change as you embark on your quest to build the perfect product and it's important to constantly review and refine what it is that the team is building through backlog refinement. On the note of acceptance criteria, I am not a fan of it because I feel it builds a habit of building to the acceptance criteria and not to what a great product should be. I encourage you to consider writing your stories and features in such a way that it is crystal clear what the end result will be, and empower the team to build to that vision, and not to the checklist that is the acceptance criteria.

To refine your backlog first you need to understand the priority, and need to make sure that those prioritise items gives value. Of course it may change but ultimate goal of building the product will not change so easily. I usually keep grooming session once in two weeks, for 30 - 60 minutes only, I do not like to keep my engineers busy in multiple calls.

In practice the trigger point of picking from backlog item OR grooming is consider when there is NO new work item identified or requested by the stake holders. Now this is not some gold standard followed by everyone its just one of the ways. The more better approach is to always having the backlog about under the enhancements these enhancement should not be larger t-shirt size

Product backlog should not be a feature factory, every feature should deliver a value to our customer without causing additional pain.

Additionally, I would also like to add in a Product Roadmap branching off the Product Vision with 1. goals 2. features 3. and metrics As this can then aid in refining and prioritizing the product backlogs and user persona to address in the rollouts

Continuous exploration of customer intents is needed for backlog management in Agile. Once initial needs of the customer is met, then additional needs will arise. Capturing these additional needs in the backlog is important for growth of the product. In addition to continous exploration activities, the CI/CD pipeline is very important. Rapidly integrating and deploying the user stories and features helps with keeping the product competive in complex markets. Lastly, stakeholder expectation management will help with identification of stories that have higher business value and should be prioritized.

Shipping product successfully and maintaining a successful product needs collaboration, commitment and Empathy. You just can not ship the product and forget about it, aftercare is also very important to maintain the quality of outputs which is getting generated through your product.