Make no mistake: Your Product Backlog is the last line of defense preventing your Scrum Team from becoming a feature factory; hence Product Backlog defense is vital: Figure out a process that creates value for your customers. Moreover, have the courage — and the discipline — to defend it at all costs.
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In my keep-it-simple and thus two-dimensional product world, the Product Backlog defines the near-term planning as the lynchpin of the product creation process:
The near-term planning horizon in my mental model covers about four to 16 weeks. It is where the product discovery phase delivers validated ideas of valuable product Increments to the product delivery phase. (I shy away from calling it a hand-over as this term has a negative connotation rightfully.)
At this moment, there should be no longer doubts about why a product Increment is valuable to your customer and your organization. The 'why' question has been answered at this stage. Probably, you will still discuss the scope of the idea for its first delivery, and the developers will think about how this product Increment will fit best into the application. However, the Scrum Team members' discussion should no longer revolve around basic questions from the 'valuable, feasible, usable' perspective. That has been accomplished further to the left side during the product discovery phase.
If you are practicing Scrum, the near-term planning will cover something between two to six Sprints.
This transfer from product discovery to product delivery is a serious moment from the investment perspective. Now, the Scrum Team gets real and allocates resources to product delivery, for example, the continued collaborative refinement of the related Product Backlog items. Or sketches are turned into designs, and some preliminary work is probably required on the tech stack side. (Of course, this does not rule out that the Developers already contributed to final validation steps, for example, by creating a high-fidelity prototype with access to real-time data.)
Now the Scrum Team becomes accountable for spending money and producing a return on investment. Suppose you fail to deliver this return because you accepted some work that bypassed your team's product creation process for whatever reason. In that case, you will be rightfully responsible for this failure, too. And no one will be interested in reading the fine print of why this happened. It is on you.
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Crossing the before-mentioned threshold is also why the near-term planning or the Product Backlog part of the product creation process is so attractive to stakeholders who try to bypass the process and sneak in requirements or features.
Entering a competition of ideas and hoping that an idea will pass validation is a considerable effort and bears a significant risk of being rejected. The shortcut of targeting the near-term planning phase instead is hence less risky.
Typically, you can attribute a stakeholder's attempt to evade the competition of ideas part of the product discovery phase to their incentives provided by the organization. Or as Charlie Munger puts it:
"Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives."
There are various patterns of flanking maneuvers, depending on the organization's nature, age, and size. For example:
There are at least seven stakeholder interference patterns that make the Product Backlog defense mandatory for any Scrum Team:
A note of caution: Do not outflank yourself during Product Backlog defense. The discipline to defend your product creation process from stakeholders' attempts to bypass it needs to be applied with the same rigor within your team. For example, please do not use the Product Backlog as a repository of ideas that might only be useful later, thus clogging it, muddying the signal in a lot of noise. Apply these rules indiscriminately to everyone.
If you want to be taken seriously as a product team and want the organization to accept your Scrum Team as the go-to team that solves critical customer problems and identifies opportunities for the organization, then defend your process with tooth and claw. Making exceptions from this rule is a slippery slope leading to becoming a feature factory.
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28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory
A Forensic Product Backlog Analysis — Making Your Scrum Work.
Product Backlog Anti-Patterns Q&A
Product Discovery Anti-Patterns Leading to Failure
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