The DoR ensures the team understands what the work entails and can estimate the time needed for it to get done. Meeting participants can ask questions and offer feedback, resulting in streamlined sprint planning meetings. In addition, the shared understanding of the project makes sprint planning easier and quicker. Because these meetings require the team to discuss each item in detail, the team and stakeholders develop a shared understanding of what the work requires and which items should be prioritized.
Product managers are always looking for ways to get a clear picture of their backlog. In recent years, teams have turned to new techniques such as Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and the DEEP Backlog method. Let’s examine what each of the four key attributes of a good product backlog entails. In the Product Backlog them, the more valuable the higher priority entry, above, the lower the value of the entries in the Product Backlog, the lower the priority, following in the Product Backlog.
Why a DEEP Product Backlog is Critical for Successful Product Development?
He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile as well as the Better User Stories video course. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance and can be reached at If you want to succeed with agile, you can also have Mike email you a short tip each week. It’s a decision-making artifact that helps you estimate, refine, and prioritize everything you might sometime in the future want to complete.
Keeping your customers embedded in your process will help you make refinement decisions that are in the best interest of the customer, no matter what phase of development you’re in. Ideally, backlog refinement sessions are run by either the product manager or the product owner. Another senior member of the team, the project manager, or the ScrumMaster may also conduct a backlog refinement or grooming session. When the meeting ends, follow up by sending the meeting minutes to all participants and ensuring they understand the priority of the items discussed. Breaking down the development into action items using a tool like Jira Software helps keep the critical backlog components in focus.
What Is a DEEP Product Backlog?
Most companies conduct the backlog refining session between 45 minutes to almost one hour. The said timespan is sufficient to illuminate user stories for several forthcoming sprints. Excessively longer sessions for backlog grooming are not particularly advised since they need more focus and concentration and may obstruct the core responsibilities of the development team. The backlog refinement meeting is the time to examine existing user stories and evaluate whether they are still relevant to the project.
- But it is a good practice to allocate two hours for the first few meetings.
- Stories are the unit of software design, development, and value delivery.
- This attribute of an excellent product backlog is especially critical in Agile.
- The lists are typically too long and excessively or needlessly detailed.
- Another important part of establishing a backlog is to set milestones for when the backlog needs to be completed.
Obviously, these are opposite ends of the spectrum, and we want to be somewhere in the middle. The fact that goes missed by a lot of Product Owners is that the target for the level of specificity changes based on the implementation horizon of the Product Backlog Item. Last month, when I was collaborating with a colleague to visualize their workflow on a Kanban board, we talk about some weird situations as the team was working on requirements. Product Marketing Manager at Digital.ai, tells her story of how a positive app experience led to the realization that proper data integration is essential to the entire application lifecycle. Connecting with stakeholders is one of the finest means of obtaining internal and external feedback.
Prioritizing Product Ideas
Hence, using the spreadsheet needs a tedious effort and an ample amount of time. Many think of this backlog as a to-do list, and define it in exactly this way, as a list of things you must do to deliver your product to market. PI Planning aims to bring together all the people doing the work and empower them https://infodnepr.ru/?module=articles&action=view&id=9124 to plan, estimate, innovate, and commit to work that aligns with the business’s high-level goals, vision, and strategy. The last step is to clearly define what needs to be done to complete the backlog. This will help to ensure that everyone is on board and that they are all working towards the same goal.
Based on the information you have at that moment in time, make an approximate estimate on the exertion required for that backlog item. On the other hand, items that are lower on the priority list don’t require nearly as much detail. It’s a poor use of time to add details to lower priority items since you never know how the backlog is going to evolve. You could waste a lot of time detailing low-priority items when they might be removed or revised later on in the process. Backlog items represent what it will take to develop a new product or improve an existing one with new features.
