Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
The biggest risk to most projects is building the wrong product. Regardless of how fast your agile team becomes, how brilliant your technical solutions are, or how many automated tests run continuously, nothing matters if you’re building the wrong product.
In this tutorial we’ll look at non-financial ways of both prioritizing product backlog items and choosing among competing project ideas. Included are relative weighting, theme screening, theme scoring, and Kano analysis.
The techniques are easy, the concepts are powerful. You’ll return home with practical knowledge about applying these straightforward techniques.
Prioritizing at the Right Level (10 minutes) This section describes the approach that will be taken during this session and then presents the view that the product backlog must be prioritized at the right level. Prioritizing efforts are burdensome and confusing if done with features that are too small; for example, which is higher priority, the front left wheel of a car or the front right wheel? Prioritizing is useful at a higher level (the air conditioning system vs. the transmission).
Non-financial Prioritization (80 minutes) This section will describe some non-financial prioritization techniques such as Kano analysis, theme screening, theme scoring, relative weighting, and analytic hierarchy process. A little over half of this type will be spent on two hands-on exercises to help participants understand the techniques.