Managing your pipeline for Product Management

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one of the most common phrases the product managers say is thanks very much i'm going to add it to the backlog today we're going to talk about the backlog [Music] what is going on everybody welcome to another video my name is alex if you want to know about product management business and how to get into the top tech companies make sure to subscribe hit the bell icon so you don't miss any of the new videos today we're going to be talking about managing your backlog as a product manager as always this is different depending if you're working on your own startup startup with some friends or a small company or a mid company or a big top tech company as a product manager it's your job to track all the happenings with the product what's happening what will be happening what should be happening should not be happening what features are interesting what features should be developed what features should not be developed all of the stakeholder management what do the users want what do the developers want the engineers want what does the executive want what do your investors want or expect and you're tracking all that and hopefully you've got your road map you've got your product your business principles to how you're making decisions about what you're building but then you've got this other area which is called the backlog that's where all of the other ideas that may not be immediately on the roadmap live and let's let me give you a little bit of a refresher of what the backlog is the backlog is basically a giant list of all of the things that could possibly be done to your product that you your team or anyone else in the vicinity certainly your customers your stakeholders your partner teams anyone else has ever suggested or requested of your product and it's basically an exhaustive list of all of these items if you're a one-person startup then you're gonna make a list of all of the things that you want your product to be and then you're gonna pick some of those things and work on them and then the rest are gonna stay in the backlog and then you might pick out some of those things and say i'm gonna do some of these in this month or next month or this quarter or next quarter and that's your roadmap so the backlog and the roadmap are inextricably linked and today we're gonna talk about how to actually manage your backlog and what you should be doing with it why does the backlog exist well a lot of the times we have a tendency to sort of work on shiny stuff so whatever shiny whatever's coming in whatever's escalating whatever new feature request the customer has or your executive sent you an email with some request or the engineering team came up with an awesome new feature that is going to change everything and we have a tendency to just do the newest thing and just do the latest thing and so the backlog exists as an entity as a space for where you can put all of these ideas so you don't have to necessarily stop what you're doing and you can actually have some semblance of a plan that you're working on hopefully that is based on certain product principles and your company or product mission or vision and that you can actually stick to it while being certain that these ideas and requests don't get lost they are in one place to give you the full cycle of what happens with the backlog is first you continuously get new inputs into the backlog new ideas continue to come in you as the owner of the backlog every week two weeks month or quarter however often you want and are able to do it commit to reviewing this backlog with a cross-functional team with the bare bones people that are required to make the decision of what actually gets done and what does not get done you think about a couple things you think about what the item on the backlog actually means is it a project is it a feature is it a set of features what does it actually mean disambiguate it break it down into potential changes to the product meaning features and think about what is the possible impact if you were to do this or if you were to remove this or if you were to implement this request this item on this backlog what would be the impact to your users to your product your company what is the effort required what will you need to do in terms of actual engineering time or maybe other resources ux design research implementation infrastructure what else is required what is the effort it doesn't have to be exact for analogies but just rough sizing how big is the effort required how big is the impact what are any dependencies or caveats that are important to consider for each item and then you have a list of items that are on the backlog disambiguated understood sized for impact effort caveats and you can actually make the decision of what to do with this item should you put it on the roadmap where should you put it on the roadmap should it be ahead of something else should something be removed or updated and that reorganizational work you do every again week month quarter whatever it's convenient for you and that's called backlog grooming or backlog management and so in its entirety a backlog will store all the new possible ideas then give you some time to evaluate those ideas and figure out whether they should be developed and when they should be developed so that's backlag management now let's talk about the actual backlog inputs what is the backlog populated from so of course the first thing everything you know about your users what do your users actually tell you what does the behavior of your users tell you if you can track it what feature request do users have what are they asking for what do they implicitly asking for or explicitly asking for explicitly meaning they actually tell you i want this feature implicitly they try to do a certain behavior but the feature doesn't exist or the product doesn't do what they actually want them to do or what they expect them to do you can sort of make an inference that that's what the user wants sometimes by the way what the user asks for and what they want are also two different things but no matter because the backlog stores the inputs everything that's coming in at you and your development team number two team members engineering team the sales team you yourself might think of an idea at night or on the weekend make sure to jot it down your executives other partner teams other stakeholders anybody else in the company they might throw items at you i would recommend that you don't respond immediately to most items unless you have very clear principles product principles and strategy and mission and vision where you can easily relate to that easily put that request in context of your mission or vision or product principles and easily give an answer that makes sense defend the answer but a lot of the times you're going to need to actually add it to the backlog say that you've added it to the backlog and then come back with an answer whenever you've completed your next backlog review be that next month or whenever as the product manager you're also responsible for expectations management which we should have a separate video on by itself because it's very very important but what it basically means is that if you said you're gonna add something to the backlog tell them when you can expect to hear back tell tell that person when they can expect to hear back from you because your next backlog review you're going to give them an answer on that and then the next thing is of course to do it go through your backlog review processes make determinations tie your decisions to your roadmap to your product principles to your company or product vision and mission and then get back to that person or organization or team or whoever originated the idea now i'm going to tell you it's going to be pretty hard for you to actually make decisions on this backlog even after you've sized the impact and the effort if you don't have some guiding vision for how you think about your product what is most important for you or your product or your team is it to grow the users is it to grow the revenue is it to land specific accounts or release specific functionality what are the guiding areas pillars that are important foundational for you your product or your team think about that because that's going to help you make decisions during backlog management if you've done that then make sure to schedule your backlog grooming sessions frequently enough where they're overlapping with your sprints or the work cycles that you have but not frequent enough where it happens too often and you're unable to actually execute your regular work as much as possible roll up features and ideas and concepts into themes and into bigger groups so that you're thinking of things in terms of first principles as opposed to adding a particular feature or cosmetic change think about what it is that you're actually trying to change and see if you can address that as opposed to just working piece by piece feature by feature a little element by element see if you can group certain items on the backlog into bigger and more foundational elements of course it will come with practice make sure you just develop a habit of writing down all new ideas that you have or your team has or anybody else sends your way write it down at a separate doc that you process at specific time intervals set aside some time with your core cross-functional team members or even by yourself just to go through it and get a sense of the impact the effort and once you develop these habits it's going to be a lot easier for you to be able to respond to feature requests that you think are outlandish or out of nowhere and conversely it's going to make it easier for you to actually be able to see and respond faster to very important feature requests because you notice it as you start maintaining your backlog processing it more often referring to it and actually letting that populate your roadmap or letting that guide your product development it's going to become a virtuous cycle so separately we're going to talk about how to actually create those foundational product principles or your overall mission and vision but for now if you like the video make sure to smash the like button as always and subscribe if you haven't already and hit the little notification bell to make sure you stay up to date on all the latest videos if you have any questions about backlog management or any other product management or business related aspects please let me know down in the comments i answer every comment i hope you stick around and check out some of the other videos that we have available thank you very much for watching and i'll see you next time