Product backlog

On this page we will show you how we handle and prioritize the feature requests, ideas and other tasks with the Feature Score add-on.

Collecting feedback

We distinguish feedbacks, ideas, and proposals with different issue types from the developer tasks. We create Idea type of Issue from all internal proposal, and they are usually treated as a lower priority task. For user feedbacks, feature requests or bug reports we use the Atlassian Issue Collector. This tool is very flexible and easy to use. You can gather all necessary information that you need. One of the best features of the Issue Collector that it instantly generates a Feedback type of Issue in our JIRA that we can review easily.

Boards

In our company many projects are running, an we use different methodologies for them. We are old friends with Scrum, and it's a perfect framework for customer projects. However, for our add-on development projects, we chose the Kanban system.

Using Kanban system, we are not tied to strict deadlines, as in the case of the scrum. We can plan flexible and release fast, as it is great for continuous delivery with changing priorities. Variable team size will also benefit from this system, after all, sometimes resources should be reallocated elsewhere. With the kanban board the team is able to track the progress of work through its workflow in a highly visual manner.

We use two kanban board: one as the backlog of the product, one as a traditional development board.

Product Backlog

After reading Dan Radigan's blogpost at Atlassian Blogs, we created a dedicated kanban board with a special workflow for user feedbacks. This way, the product owner is free to review, specify and prioritize work in the backlog without ever disrupting the team. Every feedback, feature request, improvement proposal is here until it travels through the board and the associated workflow.

If the Ready for development queue gets low, the product owner can pull items from the Unprioritized column, etc.

Using this system makes a lot easier to manage and prioritize user feedbacks. But figuring out what build next may be still one of the hardest decisions for the product owner. In general, we rely on our instincts because we can not rely on real numbers.

This is where Feature Score can really help you!

Our add-on will help you to build a product pipeline with prioritized features based on your key business metrics. You can easily set your key parameters to rank your features and get your scores. This score point will determine the value of your feature, and you can prioritize them based it. Let me show you how it works based on Josh Pigford's DIE: Demand, Impact, Effort framework, what we really like.

The DIE is a simple scoring system that guides product managers what features to build next. You rank your features with three paramater and the result of those ratings is a score where the lower the number, the more important the feature is. As Josh said: "The goal of this is not to create something that categorically makes decisions for you, or to somehow quantify exactly how much business impact this will make so that you can’t screw things up."

The three parameters:

Demand: "Demand is how much your customer base and target market wants the feature."
Impact: "It’s the thing you want to affect."
Effort: "How much work will this feature require."

You add options and values for each parameter, eg. High option with value of 1. This way you can evaluate each feature individually and get the scores.

With Feature Score, you can immadeiately see your feature's value on the Issue screen and also how it will be calculated based on the configured equation. Being a simple custom field means, that you can add to every screen where you want to see the score.

TODO: Cserélni

In our case, I want to see the scores on the product backlog kanban board, and prioritize features and tasks based on them. As you can see on the screeshot above, this is really easy to do.

I review every raw feedback, and if it's relevant, I set the parameters and move the Issue to the Unprioritized column. In this case, I set the Demand value based on how many related requests was received. The Impact value is always determined by the current business and/or product strategy.

One of the great features of JIRA is that if you do not want to manually sort the Issues on the board, it is enough to set the order in the filter, eg. project = AM AND issuetype = Feedback ORDER BY "Feature Score". In this case, your feature order is tied to real numbers every time you look at it.

Product Development

We use a Kanban board with a simple workflow (To do, In progress, Testing, Done) for the developer tasks. However, depending on your team and process, the workflow can be mapped to meet your needs.

If you do not want to maintain a whole board for the feedbacks, then of course the product manager/owner can easily prioritize the To Do list based on your configured score on the Developer board. As long as you keep the highest ranked items on top, the development team is assured they are delivering maximum value to the business.

Measure and analyze

If you are still here, I want to show you something really cool!

Depending on the ranking (higher/lower is better) configuration and based on the range of possible scores, Feature Score will classify the features into four categories. The categories are shown by colors and by default have the following meanings:

RED: Best left alone (lowest 25% of the scores),
YELLOW: Low priority,
BLUE: Medium priority,
GREEN: High priority (highest 25% of the scores).

Feature Score provides you two dashboard gadget that allows you to display and analyze how much value you are delivering with each release.

For example, with Delivered Feature Score Statistics Bar Chart you can displays the sum of score points in each version for a Feature Score custom field and/or saved filter as a bar chart. It is easy to see with the feature category colors that how much value you have given to users.

If you enjoyed this article, try out Feature Score now!