How to Plan a Prosperous Product in Tumultuous Times

Here’s a 16-point plan for creating a successful product in the face of today’s continuous change. It’s a plan that relies on a well-made, continuously updated product backlog.

The only constant these days?

It’s change.

The best organizations are meeting that change halfway by adopting Agile and DevOps methodologies to deliver continuous value to their customers. The methods for delivering this value (Agile, Waterfall, etc.) may vary by team and industry. But success boils down to this: a well-developed product backlog that’s owned by the team.

How do you achieve that? Here’s a 16-point plan to point you in the right direction…

1. Begin with a vision, an ambitious goal!
2. Invest in a product owner.
3. Listen to customers, to the market, to stakeholders.
4. Gather their ideas — systematically.
5. Turn those ideas into value — incrementally.
6. Create a good high-level plan to deliver that value.
7. Align everyone to the plan — continuously.
8. Create and prioritize a product backlog.
9. Make sure everyone understands the immense value of a product backlog.
10. Let the product owner actually own the product backlog.
11. Let the scrum team scrum.
12. Let the scrum master solve problems.
13. Never stop listening to customers, market, and stakeholders.
14. Never stop refining to discover the backlog’s emergent and underlying value.
15. Never forget numbers 13 or 14…
16. So your product can prosper in these tumultuous times.

That’s it.

Well...

Not exactly — there’s so much more to it as you know.

But at the least we have a plan!

(Which is always better than its alternative: no plan.)

WEBINAR: How to Organize Game Developers With Different Planning Needs >>

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