Product Backlog Release Metrics
Product backlog owner responsibilities include following up on the user stories for each product release to ensure the commitment has been delivered in addition to the prioritization negotiated with the business and agreed with the team.
As product backlog owners, we play a crucial role. It is essential to align the vision and roadmap with overall knowledge of the product, including the product evolution and how user stories fit in each feature. Writing user stories is a key factor to begin product development, but this is not the only task on which to focus. Being a liaison between the business and the team is another crucial duty for a product team member in order to prioritize the product backlog and to complete each release goal.
Start in different product development life cycle phases as a challenge to show results and generate value for the team
The product development life cycle in an agile project most of the time starts with a discovery using tools like the product vision (Pichler, 2021), to define the product’s goals, needs, target group, business value, and product features. These features can be broken down through different tools like story mapping, typically generating an MVP product backlog that allows you to give a usable product to the final client and to continue working according to the user’s feedback to increase the product features and obtain the right roadmap for the product evolution.
As a product team member, you can start as part of a project in different phases of the product life cycle, and It is important to understand the vision of the upcoming work to complete the backlog in each release and communicate this strategy to the team.
To validate the feature prioritization based on the business goals gives an strategic vision to the project.
Each release has a group of features that have to be developed to complete the release goal. A product canvas (Pichler, 2021) could help you review the release scope, understand the metrics that will be used to measure the product goals, review the big picture of the product related to the release, view the product details delivered in each sprint, and define the right path of the product according to user needs. To follow up the release pending product backlog you can use metrics generated from different tools like Jira (Radigan,2021) through dashboards, reports, or personalized tools.
Dashboards and reports as tools to follow up the product backlog release metrics
A dashboard is a tool that could be used to follow up the release planning and facilitate communication with stakeholders. Dashboards can include KPIs to analyze all Product Backlog Items like stories by features and by state, pending stories to complete a feature, the number of stories per status (in analysis, ready for development, pending PO approval, done, etc.), stories by Team, documented stories in each sprint, and more information related to the product backlog to easily show all information related to pending work to achieve the DoD (Definition of Done) of each commitment item. This information can help in making decisions about the best way to complete the pending work on time and within the capacity allocation.
A healthy backlog is associated with the DoR (Definition of Ready) which could be described as the user stories that have all definitions required to be developed by the team, including information like narrative, acceptance criteria, descriptions, attachments, estimation, completing the INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) check, and more items agreed by the team. It is a good practice to validate the PBI’s with the team in the grooming session to have these items ready for development.
You can consider that your backlog is healthy when you have enough PBI’s ready to work according to the team velocity before the planning session. To have a way to measure it, It is useful the healthy backlog KPI that shows the relation between the pending items ready for developer and the velocity of the team. If this relation is greater than one represents that we have enough items for the team to the next sprint.
Healthy backlog KPI = (SPS / SPV)
SPS: story points of the prioritized stories accomplishing the DoR
SPV: team velocity represented in story points
If the result of the healthy backlog is greater than one gives the team enough work for one sprint, but what if the team improves the velocity and have time to take another item of the backlog but we don’t have items ready?
It is a challenge to have always items ready for developer because of the priorities changes or the user's feedback but having in account this indicator is a way to control the backlog healthy with the team and if this indicator is near to 2 or greater gives more confidence to the product team and the risk of having the team without work is mitigated.
In some projects, we have been using reporting tools like PowerBi Microsoft (2021) or Jira Dashboards to show the stakeholders the product release backlog in sessions like the sprint review. This minimizes the time spent explaining each feature’s scope, showing the stories that have accomplished the DoR for the next sprints, and communicating the pending work to complete each feature according to the release commitment.
Finally, there are different metrics to control the project that can be used by the management team, and there are metrics related to the product according to the final user feedback. In our role as product backlog owners, we have to concentrate our efforts on assuring that each documented story accomplishes the DoR and is prioritized according to the defined roadmap in order to have a healthy backlog and generate value for the client.
REFERENCES
Pichler, R. (2021). Strategic Tools. Retrieved from https://www.romanpichler.com/tools/
Microsoft (2021). Go from data to insight to action with Power BI Desktop. Retrieved from https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/
Radigan D. (2021). The product backlog: your ultimate to-do list. Retrieved from https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum/backlogs
Forman A. (2021). Jira Core dashboard: your project status at a glance. Retrieved from https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-core/jira-core-dashboard-project-status-glance
