The Strategic Product Backlog: Lead, Follow, Watch and Explore

The economic outlook for 2023 suggests many organizations will be leading through a period of resource scarcity as IT budgets are scrutinized and organizational priorities are re-evaluated. For the product manager, smaller budgets and fewer resources place even greater emphasis on ensuring alignment between enterprise priorities and the product backlog.

Many tools are available to help product managers prioritize individual work items at a tactical level for DevOps teams. These models generally seek to quantify some combination of internal stakeholder value and level-of-effort required for developers and DevOps teams to complete. Higher-value lower-effort items rise to the top.

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Other strategic factors are just as important in the prioritization process, particularly for products living within a larger enterprise product portfolio and competing for scarce resources. For these, a product manager must understand why a given work item or capability should be given priority and how it should be pursued. This involves asking questions such as: On what basis should an item come into the product consideration set? How much should DevOps and developers seek to innovate in delivering a specific capability or feature? What is the product and the portfolio-level opportunity cost of pursuing a given piece of work?

A strategic model for backlog evaluation helps to set expectations with DevOps, developers and other internal stakeholders and ensure customer needs are front and center in prioritization decisions. It establishes a common language for collaboration. Two dimensions should emerge in evaluating capabilities at higher product and portfolio levels: Capability alignment to business-level strategy and the potential for a capability or feature to not just satisfy but captivate customers with a novel or compelling experience.

The intersection of business strategy and customer experience factors can serve as a useful model for a product manager to think strategically about their backlog. The model helps to inform not only the question ‘Should we do this?’ but also ‘How should we proceed?’ and make things clearer for DevOps teams.

Lead

Items in this quadrant are the unicorns of the backlog and have the greatest potential to both strategically differentiate a product or enterprise and captivate customers. Product focus in this quadrant should be to invest in innovative, industry-leading approaches to satisfying customer needs in a manner that is consistent with business strategy and unique selling proposition. These items should receive the highest strategic priority on the product backlog.

Follow

Potential work items in this quadrant have a high potential to delight customers if handled well and irritate them if not. However, these elements are unlikely to be competitively differentiating given the current business strategy. Product focus in this quadrant should be to continually assess competitor treatment of these elements and adopt proven best-in-class experiences within the industry and adjacent industries. The product should focus moderate priority on competitive intelligence for elements in this quadrant and follow existing competitor approaches that enhance the customer experience.

Watch

Items in this quadrant are generally not problematic for customers. They are unlikely to differentiate the product or enterprise from competitors given the current business strategy and should be given low priority. The product should monitor proposed solutions in this quadrant to ensure no unnecessary customer effort is being introduced by other backlog items.

Explore

Product functionality in this quadrant is either not problematic for the customer experience or represents capabilities that are still emerging in the marketplace. These elements have a likelihood of developing into competitive levers, provided they can be developed in a manner that enhances the customer end-to-end journey. The product should place a high priority on product discovery for elements in this quadrant. It should explore capability innovation through design thinking or similar customer-centered ideation approaches.

Mapping a product backlog to these four quadrants is as much art as science. It requires a deep understanding of business strategy, intended outcomes and customer needs. As with any strategic model, its value comes from the quality of discussions it produces and its role in surfacing implicit assumptions from the product’s stakeholder group, including DevOps teams and developers. Whatever model is used, having a mechanism to drive strategic product discussions is a critical tool in the product management toolbox and an important step to product management maturity.