Describe a time where you had limited time and human resources and had to be selective on which products you and your team could execute. What products did you end up focusing on and why?

Ambitious Product Managers and Product Organizations should always have aspirations that are bigger than budgets permit.  If we do not dream big, we are not thinking of self-disruption, which is the only way to stay a step ahead of competitive threats.  The lens of reality, however, is always applied after the aspirational goals are captured.  We do this by utilizing a fixed capacity assumption by each product line and then prioritizing the work.

We start with OKRs to set a clear vision and specific organizational goals for the year. The OKRs included here are for 2021; we established them in November of 2020 and had our roadmaps completed by the end of December 2020, so we would be ready for 2021 on Jan 1.

New Ideas are presented using a Lean Business Case format. We follow a modified SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise) methodology to prioritize work at the Portfolio Level. Here is a link that explains SAFe further if you are not familiar with it. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/portfolio-safe/

 Every quarter, I challenge myself and product managers, UX designers, and our developers to propose new ideas against the exiting prioritized backlog of work we are managing for the next four quarters.

 We then determine work priority based on a 4-box matrix of business impact and technical effort. Low effort/high-value work is prioritized at the top of the portfolio backlog, and the backlog is considered fluid. Business Impact scoring is provided by Product Managers and includes OKR alignment at the business and organizational level and potential ROI. 

Technical Effort scoring is provided by the implementation team based solely on the information provided in the Lean Business Case and is delivered in the form of T-shirt sizing. We can make an informed best guess on effort within a 1-hour meeting with no more than three technology representatives, one from UX and 1 representing the lean business case.

Finally, we sequence the work on roadmaps, which are used merely as a visual aide and communication tool – since every quarter we revisit and re-sequence the upcoming work based on the value/effort matrix.  Here is an example of a roadmap for the responsive website product line. 

 Suppose we have a date-driven priority deliverable. In that case, we project the expected delivery date by leveraging historical data available in Atlassian / JIRA like team velocity and team capacity. We prefer not to do this, but under extenuating circumstances – when we need something sooner than the projected delivery date, we can either deprioritize something that is scheduled to be worked on in another product line to apply a second scrum team or go to the leadership team with a cost estimate for incremental capacity and business impact/risk of not pursuing the deliverable.