How we ‘Think customer’ inside our backlog
At SafetyCulture, we don’t only believe in our values but we also rely on them to resolve our daily challenges.
We as team work together to research, define and evaluate our features, however, the biggest challenge to bring our amazing ideas to life is feature planning (aka priority management).
To ship life-changing features from our diverse and tremendous backlog, and ensure that these deliveries have the most impact on our customer experience, we -in my team- challenged ourselves to put the customer interests in every decision by relying on the following simple questions
‘Which feature is more valuable to our customers ?’
‘What feature can be shipped to our customers asap ?’
Research
Defining the set of problems to be examined by each team is inspired by the company’s business strategy, product roadmap, and certainly the customer's feedback. Nonetheless determining effectively the How or the approach to resolve each problem is the responsibility of each team, which would not be achievable without engaging our customers in decision making.
Working iteratively with our clients, through multiple discussions and workshops results in a shared and clear perception of the Why or the motive behind each Epic, Story, design and acceptance criteria.
Customer value
By involving our customers and the team in the decision making, we aimed to find a healthy balance between Customer value and technical complexity through a simple and clear representation of our backlog.
Our deliveries became not only faster but more impacting as we have now a clear path of the What / When implementing each feature.
Feedback
What’s the best way to improve our deliveries and learn about our impact on the customer's life than actually getting their feedback.
Straightforward questions help the team members collect and assess efficiently the customer experience; e.g
Can you rate how useful was the feature you just viewed?
Which of these features would be most valuable to you ?
Actioning the outcomes of every discussion with our users ensures not only an up-to-date backlog and better understanding of the customer value for each feature but also a steady path through a continuous improvement mindset.
Want to know more about my team’s work please visit User profile and leave us feedback.
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