How to Prioritize Your Product Backlog

After watching Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software speak on the subject, I thought it would be useful to jot down my takeaway as well as some screen caps of the presentation:

(If you're new to scrum, here's a quick video primer on the topic of the history of scrum and its components...)

User Stories - Short to epic statements told from the perspective of the user.



The Iceberg - A pyramid of backlog items which appear in groups of small Items at the top and larger scope items in the middle and bottom.



Kano Analysis - The process of using exciters/delighters, linear, and mandatory features to adjust the priority of features in the product backlog.



Kano Analysis Process - Here's a glimpse of what the process looks like in action...



Theme Screening - Identify the selection criteria for what is important and evaluate against the baseline (mandatory) features.




Baseline Theme - The baseline theme is one that is likely but not guaranteed to be included in the upcoming release.

Theme Scoring - Similar to Theme Screening but avoids category compression by adding a weighting system. Doesn't have a single baseline theme but instead offers reference themes per attribute.




Relative Weighing - a prioritization approach that considers both the positive benefit of the presence of a feature and the negative impact of its absence.



Other Neat Recommendations that popped out:

- spend 10% of each iteration (sprint) working on the next iteration

- avoid including backlog features in the sprint that can not be encapsulated

- groom the product backlog often

- survey of 20-30 users is large enough to qualify as a quick representative sample