NYC Apartment Tidying, Backlog Grooming, and Product Management
Subtitle: What Marie Kondo Would Tell You To Do With Your WIP.
In a 600 square foot apartment, there’s simply not enough room to be messy and get away with it.
Perhaps that’s why my wife left The Life-Changing Magic Art of Tidying Up on my nightstand. Maybe she had tripped one too many times on my computer cord extended across the living room floor (“It’s the most convenient outlet!”). Maybe she became sick of walking into our tiny second room and seeing clothes, hanging like tongues, falling out of my dresser.
In New York City, when you have too much stuff, there’s nowhere to hide it.
To Tidy Is To Toss Out.
I read the book in two days. On the third day, I entered our second room, armed with an unopened box of trash bags, and shut the door behind me. Kondo’s first step to tidying was seared in my brain: start by discarding, all at once, intensely and completely.
I began my purge. Christmas socks from my mom, a personality assessment from my college career center, the half-read book I never finished…I threw out or donated much of what I owned.
If Tidying Our Work In Process Were As Easy.
Donald Reinertsen, Jim Benson, and many others have written about the insidious effects of work in process on product development. Items sit in our backlog for years. Low value tickets distract our teams from higher priorities, which in turn incur high costs of delay as they go unworked. Like our physical spaces, our work systems also have limited capacity.
What makes tidying a NYC apartment simple is that when you have too many things, your clutter is clearly visible. But because knowledge work isn’t visible like apartment clutter, because it’s contained on someone’s hard drive, or in Smartsheet, or in JIRA, or even in someone’s mind, we don’t realize how much work we’ve committed to and just how cluttered our product pipeline really is.
We continue writing user stories when what we need to, as Marie Kondo writes, is discard. We need to get tidy.
Keep It Only If You Love It.
As product managers, we must consistently exercise the strongest move in the product management arsenal: the ability to say “no.”
But how do we know what to say “no” to?
How did I know what personal items in my apartment to toss? Marie Kondo tells us to “discard everything that does not spark joy.” I knew I was done tidying when nothing remained except the things that I love.
What Does “Love” Mean in Product Development?
As product managers, we can take the same approach as we evaluate new product and feature requests and groom our backlogs. We should commit to working on only user stories that our users love.
That sounds a little squishy for a data-driven industry. How can we quantify what “love” means in product development prioritization?
- Work that generates X% of profit margin.
- A new or revised feature that X% of our customers have asked for.
- A new or revised feature that customers representing $X in current revenue have asked for.
- Prototypes or tests that will help us learn about a market and potential needs so we can build a product users love.
How do you define work your users love? How do you decide what to discard? How do you get tidy?
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