A product backlog can be a pivotal guiding force in how a company works toward its goals — unless that backlog is messy.
Unnecessary or improperly prioritized backlog items can muddy the productivity waters, forcing teams to spend time and energy working on objectives that ultimately bear little influence on business success. To prevent this outcome, small business referral network Alignable relies on communication — and a little “prioritization poker.”
Product Marketing Manager Phillip McKee said sub-teams of engineers and product professionals across the organization gather quarterly to map the high-priority, business-essential tasks that lie ahead.
According to McKee, precedence on jobs that aren’t quite business essential are determined through prioritization poker, where stakeholders use cards to assign value to tasks.
Learn more about how Alignable maintains a streamlined backlog by getting stakeholder insight early and often, and through frequent check-ins with teams surrounding how their work is going.
Phillip McKee
PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER
What parameters do you have in place to ensure your product backlog is manageable and that its items truly belong there?
It’s critical that we prioritize the projects with the highest impact. Our backlog system, housed in Notion, keeps us on task and in the groove. We created templates for our backlog cards so anyone from any team can fill them out. The templates force the creator to dig deep into their idea. They perform research and chat with team members so we can justify and prioritize the work at hand, which keeps the backlog filled with fully-fledged ideas. During backlog grooming, we have all the information we need to make a call and get going.
Throughout our product planning process, we bring stakeholders in every step of the way.”
How do you prioritize the items that make it to your product backlog?
We look at all the potential work with stakeholders to decide what we think will drive us closest to our company objectives. The idea list is shortened to the highest impact items, then further fleshed out into what we call “epics.” Each epic gets its own team of engineers, product managers and product marketers. Since epics are so project- and goal-driven, prioritization comes easy through a biweekly grooming meeting with the epic’s team.
