Part 2: 1-N Product Management

Compiling ideas into a backlog

Established product teams should have a well pruned and prioritised backlog of items for engineering and design to pick up when they are free.

This is a lot of work because PMs has to sort through input from various channels.

The backlog should be tagged and viewable in different ways. Like, what are the top five items in each of these categories:

1. Performance

2. Stability

3. Influencer asks

4. Sales asks

5. Growth

6. tech debt

7. usability debt

8. etc

A PM should also be able to explain what framework was used to prioritise these items in each category.

The backlog should also be unified into a single tagged list.

And, finally lead PMs should ensure that release has a list of expected outcomes so that teams can get better at learning.

Teams that do this well are able to candidly discuss success and failures and make better decisions over time.

This is the job.

It is not easy.

Most teams do not do this because it requires constant monitoring and PMs get busy scoping and negotiating features “in play” right now.

One thing I’ve seen work is to have each PM manage a backlog in their area. The lead PM can plan a quarterly working session to align across PMs.

Great teams bring along other stakeholders.

They get backlogs from Design, Marketing, Sales and growth leaders and align on priorities once a quarter. The period of alignment can change depending on the size of your team and peer leadership.

I’ll talk about the Evaluating the impact of each idea in the next post.

Hope this helps.

Comment on the post if you read this far. :)

—Anubhav