In this article, I walk through how a Scrum Product Owner (PO), in collaboration with the rest of the Scrum Team and others, might bridge the “Product Management Vacuum” discussed in part II by leveraging impact maps, User Story maps, and product roadmaps for Product Backlog refinement and release planning.
Part II Recap
In part II, I explained how the PO, as part of the Scrum Team, serves as the linchpin connecting the Scrum Team to the larger organizational product management structure. The PO is responsible for fostering and maintaining ongoing collaboration between and among the Scrum Team(s), project/solution sponsors and stakeholders, customers, and end users to:
- Define and maximize IT solution value in terms of expected and realized business/mission value
- Define a product vision and strategy that aligns with organizational vision and strategy
- Align the work performed by development teams to product vision and strategy
This product management function bridges what Ralph Jocham and Don McGreal call the “Product Management Vacuum.” In the absence of a true product strategy, many organizations fill the vacuum with traditional project management activities that focus on managing tasks and people, rather than on defining the product/solution and improving development processes. This typically leads to wasted effort borne out of disconnects between the Scrum Team, the sponsor organization, customers, and end users.
Finally, I introduced Jocham’s and McGreal’s “Three Vs” construct. The “Three Vs” – Vision, Value, and Validation – sum up the product definition/management activities POs lead as part of their role. The “Three Vs” are mutually dependent and reinforcing:
- Vision drives the creation of value (features/functionality)
- Value created enables validation of business assumptions behind product development choices
- Validation informs changes to the product vision
The Official Scrum Artifacts
I am taking the time to clarify that most of the artifacts I discuss in this article are not official Scrum artifacts. The Scrum framework includes three official artifacts: the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog, and the Increment.
The Product Backlog
According to the Scrum Guide, the Product Backlog:
- The Product Backlog is the single source of requirements for a product/solution
- Only the features and functionality compiled and ordered in the Product Backlog make it into the product
- Helps the PO manage development scope
- The PO owns the Product Backlog
- Tracks product requirements evolution as the product and its environment change towards providing greater value
The Sprint Backlog
The Scrum Guide describes the Sprint Backlog as:
- The Sprint Backlog makes visible all the work the Development Team plans to do during the Sprint
- The highest ordered Product Backlog items become Sprint Backlog items
- Sprint Backlog items have enough detail for the Development Team to understand what needs to be done
- The Development Teams owns the Sprint Backlog
- Only the Development Team can change its Sprint Backlog during a Sprint
- The Development Team tracks progress and changes in work scope through the Sprint Backlog
The Increment
The Scrum Guide defines the Increment as:
- The increment is not just what the Development Team develops during the current Sprint. It includes whatever system/solution functionality the team developed in previous sprints
- Every new Increment must be “Done” at the end of the Sprint
- A “Done” increment meets the Scrum Team’s Definition of “Done”
- A “Done” increment is ready for release and capable of providing usable and valuable functionality regardless of whether the PO decides to release it
Product Backlog Refinement
Product Backlog refinement is the management of product requirements by the Scrum Team. The PO leads Product Backlog refinement in collaboration with the rest of the Scrum Team (i.e., the Development Team and Scrum Master) and with input from product/project sponsors, stakeholders, customers, and end users. During Product Backlog refinement:
- Requirements (i.e., and ) are added, updated, or deleted
- Coarse-grained requirements are refined by adding details and estimates and decomposed into smaller requirement items as appropriate
- Requirements are ordered/prioritized
As the product evolves, higher ordered Product Backlog items become more detailed and the estimates become more precise. With help from the PO, the Development Team defines and decomposes the highest ordered items they plan to work during the next iteration/Sprint into User Stories. The Development Team manages those stories in the Sprint Backlog.
Product Backlog refinement is an ongoing process. The Scrum Team decides how and when to refine the Product Backlog. However, the Scrum Guide recommends the Scrum Team expend no more than 10% of its “capacity” (i.e., the sum of productive hours across the team) on Product Backlog refinement. Product Backlog refinement is not restricted to specific timeframes or meetings. The PO can make changes to the backlog at any time or have others do so at his/her discretion.
A Product Management Scenario Example
In part I of this series, I discussed organizational and product visions and strategies generically. To help visualize how all the parts fit together, I walk through a product definition and management scenario.
Over the last year, an online retailer has experienced a significant loss of market share to competitors. The company investigated reasons for the drop in returning customers and new registrations. The findings boiled down to customer dissatisfaction with business service functions across the value chain that negatively impacted the company’s reputation. While the company enjoyed an early market lead for years, competitors were quickly closing the gap with more innovative customer-centric service options and better delivery performance. The most significant problems found were:
- Delivery problems
- Customers receiving their orders late at a quarterly rate higher than industry average
- Customer orders lost at a quarterly rate higher than industry average
- Customers receiving the wrong orders at a quarterly rate higher than industry average
- Customer service issues
- Customer complaints about being bounced from one customer representative to another with a lack of continuity between representatives
- Customer complaints about needing faster and more accessible help with “non-standard” issues requiring additional attention
- Customer wish for an online customer service feedback option integrated with their ordering experience
- Falling behind in offering new payment service options (Paypal, Google Pay, etc.)
Management shifted company strategy from a narrow focus on delivering an “outstanding” website experience to improving the entire buying experience, from online shopping to product delivery. They revamped the company’s vision to match this new value stream-based approach to customer satisfaction and updated their business strategy to support it.
Company leadership recognized that a lack of customer focus caused the company to fall behind competitors and a subsequent decline in customer satisfaction. To address this, the company changed how it defines its services by instituting a product management approach. The company started looking at its website as a collection of online service offerings. Company strategy needed to be tightly coupled to customer needs and demands, changing as the market changes.
The table below breaks out the flow down of strategic vision and business strategy to tactical product vision and strategy I explained in part I of this series. The area highlighted in yellow is the “Product Management Vacuum” filled by organizational product management and POs in collaboration with the Scrum Team and with input from project/solution sponsors, stakeholders, customers, and end users. I focus on the strategic goal to increase customer retention and acquisition through better customer service down to the tactical goal of improving the company’s Customer Service System. Text of that tactical goal and its decomposed elements is colored red.
Defining Product Features
Armed with product goals, the PO works with the Scrum Team and others to define features they believe will help achieve them based on their current understanding of the business and market context. The Scrum Team continually refines that understanding as the Scrum Team releases features to users. The ultimate validation of the business assumptions behind new features is end-user validation. New insights shape future features/capabilities and business/mission strategic and tactical strategies.
Impact Mapping
Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique Scrum Teams can leverage to develop Product Backlog items such as Epics and User Stories as extensions to a defined product strategy. Impact maps are a great tool for visualizing alignment from product vision to coarse-grained product backlog items that Scrum Teams can order and further decompose and refine over time.
The diagram below depicts the use of an impact map to decompose the product vision and product objectives for the Customer Service System. One or more coarse-grained Product Backlog items support each product objective. These backlog items will collectively form the initial version of system requirements. Over the course of Product Backlog refinement and , the Scrum Team refines these items into User Stories. Each backlog item includes of three elements:
- Actor – The role for whom the backlog item is for. The beneficiary of new feature functionality
- Impact – The desired outcome from using the feature functionality
- Deliverable – The new feature functionality that will help the actor achieve the desired impact
We avoid creating compound requirements. In other words, each backlog item is specific to one role, one deliverable, and one impact. These are high-level requirements, so the Scrum Team will identify, through their decomposition, different flavors of the same type of actor (e.g., administrator vs. regular user), related impacts for different flavors of actor, and related deliverables/features. It is important to remember that these are system/solution-level items. Too much specification now is counter-productive.
Product Backlog
After defining a set of course-grained requirements, we create the initial version of the Product Backlog. The Scrum Team writes requirements in the form of Epics and User Stories. User Stories are backlog items the Development Team estimates will take no more than one Sprint to complete and make ready for release, while Epics are estimated to take more than one Sprint. The Scrum Team decomposes Epics into User Stories as part of Product Backlog refinement.
At this point, we do not know how long it will take to complete each backlog item, so we do not know which items are Epics vs. User Stories. It is likely that these coarse-grained items will be Epics but I call them User Stories and group them under “themes.” The concept of themes is not part of the Scrum framework but they can come in handy when structuring the Product Backlog. Scrum does recommend adding backlog attributes to group items when multiple Scrum Teams are working from the same backlog.
The Product Backlog table below maps each backlog item to the desired impacts and product objectives listed in in the impact map. The product objectives become the value measures by which we measure whether each item’s feature delivers the expected business impact/outcome. I highlighted the Actor and Deliverable elements in each User Story.
Based on the coarse-grained User Stories listed in the table above, the Scrum Team knows enough about what it plans to build to provide the Customer Service System’s tactical plan.
User Story Sizing and Product Backlog Ordering
I will not go into detail about how to size and order Product Backlog items in this article. However, I will highlight some key points that support the topics covered in this article:
- The Scrum Guide refers to estimates rather than sizes. However, the most popular estimation techniques in Scrum leverage the concept of “relative sizing.” Instead of attempting to estimate how long it will take to complete a User Story, Scrum Teams use techniques like Planning Poker to estimate the story’s “size” relative to the other Product Backlog items. Relative sizing is faster to do, more intuitive, and becomes increasingly more accurate as the Scrum Team “matures” than estimating in hours.
- As part of the Scrum Team, the Development Team is solely responsible for all estimates. The PO provides the business/mission context the Development Team needs to estimate the relative size of each Product Backlog item.
- Typically, Scrum Teams estimate User Story sizes in “story points”, with “larger” stories earning higher point estimates. Often, the point scale used is the Fibonacci Series or a modified version of it. Story points are heuristically determined, numerical representations of User Story complexity, risk, uncertainty, and level of effort combined.
- By tracking the number of User Story points the Scrum Team completes across multiple Sprints (at least three Sprints), the team determines its “velocity.” Scrum Team velocity is a heuristic measure of a Scrum Team’s throughput (not productivity). It is the rate at which a team delivers fully completed, tested, and accepted User Stories during a Sprint.
- Scrum replaced Product Backlog “prioritization” with “ordering.” Ordering better connotes the concept of ongoing backlog refinement. Rather than periodically prioritizing backlog items according to vague business value categorizations, like High, Medium, and Low, and awarding multiple items the same priority, the Scrum Team continually orders backlog items based on their business value, risk, cost/size, and dependencies.
- As User Stories rise in order, the Scrum Team fleshes out story details, provides more precise story point estimates, and decomposes larger stories into smaller stories the team can complete during a Sprint.
User Story Mapping
A Product Backlog is essentially an ordered queue. As the number of User Stories grows, it becomes increasingly difficult see how all of the stories come together into a system/solution. This is especially true for solutions that involve workflows. A list of ordered features, written as User Stories, does not communicate how those features work together and what dependencies exist between them.
Scrum Teams can use User Story maps to organize an ordered Product Backlog across solution workflow steps, Sprints, and releases. Scrum Teams may use User Story maps in tandem with Product Backlogs to help identify dependencies as part of backlog refinement. It is a valuable tool to help plan releases as well.
Below is a User Story map example. The map is a simplified workflow for coarse-grained User Stories #4 and #5 in the initial Product Backlog I discussed earlier in this article. The User Stories read:
The deliverable for User Story #4, listed in the example impact map, is a user feedback form. However, as described in User Story #5, there is much more to the form then just a webpage to enter data. The Scrum Team needs to develop a workflow that links multiple roles across the organization. User Story #5 is likely an Epic in need of decomposition while User Story #4 is likely a User Story the Development Team can finish in one Sprint. As Product Backlog refinement occurs, the scope of individual stories and of the entire workflow likely changes.
In this workflow, the Customer Service Coordinator reviews incoming feedback submittals, categorizes them, and assigns them to the appropriate part of the organization for resolution/acknowledgement. Should the initial assignment be inappropriate or fail to yield a satisfactory outcome, the Customer Service Coordinator works across the organization to identify the right people to address the feedback. Otherwise, the customer receives a response.
Below is a sample User Story map for this workflow.
Let us walk through the User Story map’s elements:
The yellow cells in the User Story map example represent individual User Stories decomposed from the Epic directly above them in the “Walking Skeleton.” This decomposition is not one person’s idea of how the Epic should be broken down, not even the PO’s. It is instead the result of ongoing collaboration within the Scrum Team, informed by project sponsors and stakeholders, customers, and end users, and synthesized into a coherent product vision and strategy by the PO.
Development of a User Story map is an iterative process. As the solution takes shape iteratively and incrementally, more users, User Stories, business activities, and business tasks emerge, requiring changes to the User Story map and the Product Backlog. Fundamental changes in approach, predicated by insights learned during product validation, with actual customers and end users, may require changes to the product vision and strategy as well.
Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a planning tool used to visualize when Scrum Teams estimate they will complete coarse-grained capabilities/Epics and in what order, over a given time horizon. A product roadmap facilitates planning, not just for the Scrum Team, but also for project stakeholders outside the Scrum Team. Common uses for product roadmaps include:
- Communicating status and longer-term plans to organizational decision makers
- Identifying business/mission dependencies across planned releases
- Informs longer term business/mission planning (e.g., funding, contracting, agreements with external partners)
A product roadmap is not a schedule. It is a snapshot of current planning, not a set of fixed milestone delivery dates. Short-term release timelines (no more than three Sprints ahead) are based on User Story sizing and ordering (done as part of Product Backlog refinement) as well as demonstrated Scrum Team velocity. The PO bases longer-term release timelines on the rank order of lower-ordered Product Backlog items and current knowledge of dependencies between those items.
Like everything else in Agile and Scrum, product roadmaps are always subject to change. As the solution emerges and new learning happens, plans change. Agile planning is adaptive planning. Rather than creating detailed plans that span months or years, Scrum Teams wait until “the last responsible moment” to plan only the highest-ordered Product Backlog items in detail.
The recommended time horizon for Scrum Team planning is no more than the next Sprint and two Sprints beyond that. Based on the recommended two to four-week Sprint length, that is no more than 12 weeks. The amount of implementation detail behind a User Story increases the closer that story comes to being implemented by the Scrum Team. User Stories planned for the next Sprint are much more detailed, and their estimates are better informed, than lower ordered User Stories tentatively scheduled for later Sprints. Therefore, plans to implement solution functionality beyond the next three Sprints are highly imprecise and likely to change.
The sample Product Roadmap below maps the product strategy components I discuss throughout this article into a quarterly based plan for the year.
Release Strategy
Depending on the size of the sponsor organization/company, the PO either contributes to an organizationally agreed-upon release strategy or collaborates with the Scrum Team, project sponsors and stakeholders, customers, and end users in developing one. A product release strategy dictates:
- Release Frequency – How often Scrum Team(s) release functionality: the more frequently, the better. In Waterfall projects, there may only be only one a major release at the end of development. Release frequency for Agile/Scrum Teams ranges from releasing once at the end of each Sprint, to releasing multiple times throughout each Sprint, to achieving a steady flow of “done” functionality released on “demand” (Releasing functionality when customers/end users are ready to accept it)
- Validation Frequency – How often customers and end users validate newly released functionality. Obviously, the more often Scrum Teams release functionality, the more opportunities for validation exist
Market/mission demands drive release strategy. The sponsor organization must train, equip, and empower Development Teams and operations staff so they may deliver at a speed and cadence that matches demand. This is where plays a huge role.
In our company example, the company’s release strategy is to release at the end of every four-week Sprint. Scrum Teams monitor usage and performance metrics for the capabilities they release and the organization monitors customer feedback.
Release Planning
The product roadmap provides a high-level, “broad strokes” view of how planned releases fit together over an extended period of time. The Scrum Team plans releases at a greater level of detail and across much shorter timeframes (no more than three Sprints). A PO develops a release plan, which aligns with the operative release strategy, in collaboration with the rest of the Scrum Team, project sponsors and stakeholders, customers, and end users. A release plan takes into account the following considerations:
- The Scrum Team’s capacity to develop “done” capability at a sustainable pace
- Technical and business/mission dependencies on or arising from planned functionality
- The ability and willingness of customers and end users to “absorb” or accept planned changes
- Alignment with business/mission strategy and product strategy
Just like a product roadmap, the release plan is subject to change. Certainty over what a Development Team will develop and release over the next three Sprints is greatest for the next Sprint and becomes progressively less certain for the next two. However, since the release plan’s time horizon is so short and immediate, the frequency and magnitude of the changes should be significantly less than for a product roadmap.
Below is an example of a release plan for the Customer Feedback Workflow capability based on the User Story map discussed earlier:
Conclusion
Scrum is a framework and as such avoids over-prescribing practices and artifacts. The expectation is that practitioners will adhere to its rules and tailor existing processes to align with the framework, not the other way around. The concepts and tools presented in this series are meant to be used as enablers for aligning organizational vision and business strategy with product vision and strategy using Scrum.
Scrum has an inherent product management bias that is a definite departure from the traditional project management mentality that has reigned over organizational IT for decades. A product management approach to organizational IT shifts project-centric, internally-focused sponsor organizations towards putting the customer first and focusing on achieving outcomes, rather than executing plans.