How to Do Backlog Prioritization Easily and Efficiently? - What is backlog prioritization and why it is important? - How would you prioritize the backlog items? - How do you decide which features should take priority over others? - Iteration planning, backlog maintenance, and backlog refinement - How to prioritize a product backlog? - Most common backlog prioritization techniques - Prioritization with StoriesOnBoard

1. BACKLOG PRIORITIZATION
How to Do Backlog Prioritization
Easily and Efficiently?

2. In agile software development, prioritizing the product backlog is a
critical element of the development planning process. Deciding what to
develop first and in what order to prioritize tasks helps development
teams plan their work efficiently.
This article might help you understand what are the benefits of
backlog prioritization, and how you can do it using StoriesOnBoard.
Backlog prioritization
Contents
What is a product backlog?
What is backlog prioritization?
How to prioritize a product backlog?
Make product decisions with confidence
Summary
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management platform.

3. Backlog prioritization
How would you prioritize the backlog items? How do you decide which
features should take priority over others?
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Backlog prioritization is a critical part of the Product Owner’job. The PO
is the person who is responsible for defining the key features and
functionality of the product. The PO or the Product Manager must make
the right decisions in setting priorities to ensure that the most valuable
functionalities will be delivered within the agreed timeframe.
This article shows you the best product prioritization methods and how
to use them effectively to achieve your goals.
What is a product backlog?
A product backlog creates and maintains an up-to-date connection
between the PO and the dev team. It is a collection of key features or
user stories the dev team needs to develop your software. Backlog
prioritization helps you focus on the backlog items that represent the
highest value for the users.
(
That’s why the agile methodology calls it
value-driven development.)
The most common backlog form is a list where the most important items
are at the top so the development team knows what to deliver first.

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What is a product backlog?
A product backlog is a collection of key features or user stories the
dev team needs to develop your software. Backlog prioritization helps
you focus on the backlog items that represent the highest value for
the users.
The most common backlog form is a list where the most important
items are at the top so the development team knows what to deliver
first.
A product backlog also can be derived from the product roadmap.
You can also convert the story map into a product backlog if you
started your product discovery by first creating a backbone of the
product through user stories.
The story maps and product roadmaps help all stakeholders to see
the big picture and develop a shared product vision. On the contrary,
the backlog is most frequently used by the development team to
guide what they should develop and in what order.
Backlog Management on StoriesOnBoard
Create a backlog that even non-technical stakeholders
understand. Rally your team around the story map and
discover the user goals, journeys and potential user stories.
Slice out the MVP and further releases tremendously easy
with drag and drop.
Prioritize your backlog items to make the best decisions
Integrate the backlog to your issue tracker — the two-way
real-time sync allows you a seamless connection between
product planning and development.
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5. What is backlog prioritization?
Iteration planning, backlog maintenance, and backlog refinement
Iteration planning is also based on the backlog. During a meeting
before each iteration, all development tasks are accounted for in the
backlog and team members discuss and decide with the PO which
items should be included in the next sprint.
After the initial backlog prioritization at the beginning of the project,
Product owners should regularly review the backlog to ensure that
their previous backlog prioritization is still correct as the backlog
continues to grow. If necessary, the PO re-prioritizes the backlog to
backorder those items that have been out of scope. It is often
called backlog refinement or backlog grooming.
Backlog prioritization helps to clearly define what to focus on to
maximize the product team’s ability to create value.
Prioritizing the backlog items to be developed in terms of business and
customer value is one of the most important steps in the agile software
development process.
Why backlog prioritization is important?
Prioritization brings measurable benefits in terms of time, money, and
product success, and bad decisions set the product back. A well-
prioritized backlog organizes what the product development team
spends its time on and makes it easier to plan the release and the
next iteration.
That’s why backlog prioritization is one of the most challenging
decision-making tasks for POs.
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6. How to prioritize a product backlog?
A product backlog item can be new feature requests, epics or user
stories, bugs, design changes, change requirements, technical debt, or
action items from the retrospective.
Although it is the Product Owner’s or the Product Manager’s
responsibility to prioritize the backlog, they are not entirely on their own
to solve the task. The PO is supported in making informed decisions by
the insights and feedback from users or customers, and the development
team, and of course, there are many methods and tools to help them.
What creates value, and what to consider during product backlog
prioritizing?
Customer satisfaction / User satisfaction
Business value
Complexity
Minimizing risks
Opportunity to gain a competitive advantage
Time to develop
Cost to develop and implement
Dependencies
Number of users/frequency of users affected by the
change
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7. Most common backlog prioritization techniques
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These backlog prioritization models are a crucial part of project
planning and management.
Use the prioritization technique that suits best your team, so it is
worth getting to know the most commonly used backlog prioritization
models.
Kano Model
Opportunity Scoring
Stack Ranking
Priority Poker
MoSCoW Model
Cost of Delay
100 Dollar test
Product managers and agile teams initially choose more simple
techniques to standardize prioritization. We built some into
StoriesOnBoard, which you are free to try out.
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8. Make product decisions with confidence – prioritizing with StoriesOnBoard
Story maps are great tools for exploring user journeys in more depth,
and mapping all the steps a user can take in the product. There are
many different ways to prioritize user stories in story maps during the
product discovery phase of the agile development process.
Prioritization is also an important step in feedback management
because ideas and insights need to be prioritized on the idea board
before they are transferred to the story map.
However, we usually start planning development tasks with the larger
backlog items.
(
These can later be broken down into smaller parts of
an existing story map or in a brand new story map.
)
Therefore, for an
overview and shared understanding of all stakeholders, it can be
useful to create a roadmap of these large items to facilitate backlog
prioritization and scheduling.
Due to support informed decisions, we have added a priority
framework to the product roadmap. It’s easy and efficient to make
these sometimes difficult decisions.
Initially, the Value vs. Effort method and the RICE framework are
included in the priority view, which are the most popular methods for
prioritizing backlog items.
Let’s see them:
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9. Prioritization with StoriesOnBoard
Value vs. Effort
How to Do Backlog Prioritization Easily and Efficiently? | StoriesOnBoard
The Value vs. Effort prioritization framework is one of the easiest
ways to decide what to build next. One of the most significant
benefits of the framework is that the flexibility of value and effort
can mean different things to different companies and organizations.
Value
To determine the value of a backlog item, ask: “How does this
contribute to the achievement of the project’s objective?”
Don’t forget to standardize the definition of the values in each of
the following categories with the development team:
Barely impactful
Slightly impactful
Moderately impactful
Highly impactful
Extremely impactful
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10. Prioritization with StoriesOnBoard
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Effort
This metric helps you to decide how difficult this task is to
complete. Remember that Effort should be based on an estimate by
all parties involved and a joint decision by the dev or product team.
SX
S
M
L
XL
Learn more about this method and how to use it on StoriesOnBoard.
RICE framework
How to Do Backlog Prioritization Easily and Efficiently? | StoriesOnBoard
The RICE framework is also one of the most popular prioritization
methods, recently developed by the Intercom team.
Prioritization with StoriesOnBoard
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11. Prioritization with StoriesOnBoard
RICE makes it easy to determine which product features and other
items to include in your roadmap.
Items are scored according to the four factors that give the method
its name (Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort). This RICE score
allows quantifying importance and comparing initiatives or feature
ideas.
Reach
The ‘reach’ score is the number of users that will be affected by the
implementation of a particular feature within a given timeframe.
If it is difficult to determine the exact reach, try using a scale of
1
-
10 for different levels, e.g. 5 will be useful for 50% of the users.
Impact
To do this, you first need to define a goal and then rank the ideas
according to the degree of impact they will have on achieving that
goal. A five-step scoring system helps to measure this expected
impact:
3
=
massive impact (XL
)
2
=
high impact (L
)
1
=
medium impact (M
)
.5
=
low impact (S
)
.25
=
minimal impact (XS
)
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12. Prioritization with StoriesOnBoard
Confidence
You can use confidence to score how confident you are in your
achievement and impact estimates.
Estimate with 20%, 50%, 80%, 100%, where 20%
=
Moonshot; 50%
=
Low Confidence; 80%
=
Medium Confidence; 100%
=
High
Confidence.
Confidence confirms or casts doubt on the estimate. You are only
confident if you have data. Confidence scores help to make the
assessment more data-driven and less emotion-based.
Effort
With effort, you can measure how much time the development of the
feature will require from the whole team, and it ranks your ideas by
the amount of time their implementation requires.
Learn more about the method and how to use it on StoriesOnBoard.
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Summary
Backlog prioritization can be difficult, especially if you, as a PO, lack
experience and confidence. It may seem like there are too many
methodologies, frameworks, models, and techniques to choose
from, and on top of that, you need to agree on priorities with the
product development team.
Hence it makes sense to rely on a lightweight, reliable solution that
combines product discovery, backlog management, roadmapping,
and support backlog prioritization in a single tool to guide you
through the product development process.
StoriesOnBoard.com
End-to-end Product Management Suite
User Story Map | Roadmap | Prioritization | Feedback Management
Start FREE trial
14-day Free Trial.
No Credit Card Required.
www.storiesonboard.com