During a retrospective, as a product development team working in a complex matrix organization, we discovered a number of problems including:
- Delayed work in a sprint due to dependencies that could have been discovered earlier
- Missing key documentation for downstream data reporting teams
- Missing the opportunity to use feature toggles
- Not clearly defining and/or capturing KPIs (e.g. Business Intelligence reporting)
- Not capturing logging for back-end system health reporting (e.g. Azure reporting)
As a team and with our stakeholders, we decided we could all get better at having more in-depth conversations during backlog refinement meetings and trying to improve and solve some of the problems above. Therefore, we decided to create a list of common questions to ask during our conversational part of a user story. I got this idea from our product owner community of practice where multiple teams had already started doing something similar with positive results. To learn more about user stories in general, visit this blog post.
Some of the key questions we started asking after discussing the initial story include:
- Is the user persona understood? (Yes/No)
- Is the business problem or opportunity understood? (Yes/No)
- What is the risk of not doing this item?
- What client(s), line(s) of business, and product(s) does this story enable? (consider configurability)
- What KPI will we use to report on this item?
- Does this story meet the following criteria? (Yes/No)
- Independent (of all others)
- Negotiable (not a specific contract for features)
- Valuable (or vertical)
- Estimable (to a good approximation)
- Small (so as to fit within an iteration)
- Testable (in principle, even if there isn’t a test for it yet)
- Do we need to implement logging for back-end system reporting (e.g. service calls, API response time, etc.)
- Is technical documentation needed?
- Should we use a feature toggle?
- Do we need to add any reporting tags?
Please note that we don’t always ask these questions and use it more as a reference as needed. This list of questions has helped us to have more informed conversations and gain insights into potential problems earlier that come up in complex matrix organizations. It has also challenged all of us to think through a better business lens.
What have you tried as a member of a product development team to improve conversations?
Please leave a comment below.