Depending on your company culture, this may be difficult to do, but I've seen good luck with moving toward a model where the product team doesn't push things into developers' to-do lists. The product folks supply a strictly prioritized wish list, and developers pull from it. Always one thing at a time, always the very first thing on the list.

It's the only way I've seen to get the product people to shift their thinking from, "What's a giant list of all the things we wish we could build?" to, "What is thing we actually need to build next?" And, without that change in thinking, the natural impulse is going to be to try and pack more features into the product using a close analogue to the technique that farmers use to produce foie gras.

You may have to be willing to sit back and let them drop the ball and get burned for it a few times. If they're pure business folks with little customer support experience, they might never personally understand how fixing a bug can be more valuable to the business than building a new feature, if you don't give them a chance to talk to a user who's irate about some piece of deferred maintenance.

How do you deal with the possible disconnect between product and engineering in terms of feasibility? If #1 on the list is something that will about absorb all of engineering for years, but #2-5 can be developed in weeks each?

What kind of scope level do you think works when talking about that list? Like project level instead of tasks, and then engineering figures out how to deliver the prioritized project? Otherwise it kinda just sounds like a backlog to me, just curious how you see the difference there.

Also, I've seen product orgs that focus a lot of energy on not being burned, regardless of the scenario. They use their position at the crux of many communication channels to subtly shift blame around. Which is relatively easy to do when your role is complex and many-faceted.

It's going to invariably depend on how your company is organized, and its culture.

If you're at all able to start with something approaching the business-facing parts of Scrum, I think that's a great place to start. In Scrum, there are ideally two completely separate queues: The product backlog belongs to the business folks, and is organized in a way that works for them, and the dev team's list of tasks belongs to dev, and probably shouldn't look similar at all. And the only way for things to move from one queue to the other is during a regular meeting where the dev team says, "OK, it looks like we've got room to take on X additional work, what can you give us?"

And then, and I think this is secretly one of the most important things, the dev team physically creates new tickets for the new work they're taking on. You should never be able to just drag-and-drop tickets from one queue to the other. Ideally, it shouldn't even be physically possible to do so. Where I am right now, one is in $JIRA_COMPETITOR, and the other is an Excel spreadsheet. (If we all worked out of the same office, I'd probably go for an Excel spreadsheet and yellow sticky notes on a wall. Yellow sticky notes on a wall are awesome. They're a great deterrent to keep the PHBs from generating reports and dashboards for bothering people with KPIs.)

This little ceremony, and the associated firewall between two related but separate business functions, is, I think the heart and soul of what Scrum should be. It's the thing that sets up all the little firewalls and incentives that encourage business and dev to maintain a relationship that's more functional than dysfunctional. Everything else - sprints, story points, standup meetings, all that jazz - is just window dressing that some teams may or may not find makes that ceremony go more smoothly.

And if you can get a formal handoff like that in place, and get people to respect it, my (admittedly hopelessly idealistic) belief is that the rest of it gets easier to figure out. What's the correct scope and size of individual requests that the product people make of the dev team? Whatever size and scope best enables people to come out of the meeting feeling good about how it went.

But if everything's being jammed into one gimongous ticketing system, like all the ticketing system vendors seem to want you to do, you're doomed.

I prefer a single queue with simple rules of who can do what.

The approach I learned at Pivotal Labs was that product management decides the order of stories and bugs, since these add or subtract user value. Engineering can put chores anywhere in the backlog according to their considered discretion, since these reduce drag and risk. Each week you have the Iteration Planning Meeting to look at what's coming up. Each day engineering pulls whatever's on the top of the backlog and works on it until it's done.

It seems really straightforward to me.

If I am getting the drift right here, the root of the problem is that the Product Org is not prioritising well, and putting an upper limit on the total story points pushed in a release ?

That would lead to a large number of stories being classified as "Priority" and left to engineering to figure out how to deliver.

Separate Product Orgs, like or hate it, are not going away anytime soon. If anything, I believe they will become more ubiquitous.

Probably what we need is not more and better ticketing system, but better prioritisation systems, with well defined upper limits on how many story points can be released at once.

>secretly one of the most important things

Thanks, this is a neat idea to think about. You helped me start anchoring some untethered thoughts I've had floating around about this stuff recently.

>like all the ticketing system vendors seem to want you to do

It's so annoying how misaligned the incentives are between these vendors and the users. Standard fare for B2B products focusing on the people signing the checks though...

> Yellow sticky notes on a wall are awesome. They're a great deterrent to keep the PHBs from generating reports and dashboards for bothering people with KPIs.

Wow! You should buy a .io domain name throw up a landing page and start selling this as a feature! (On a subscription model, naturally.) Seriously though I love this point.

> As we move more and more towards ubiquitous "Product Orgs," separate from engineering

I've only seen this separation recently and I am not a fan. It just seems like a terrible wasteful way to consume time, money and goodwill. I've never seen anything more effective than small balanced teams.

yes. engineers almost always make poor product decisions if the customer is not also an engineering team, in my (vast) experience. this is because engineers aren't product experts. and if the customer is an engineering team, then engineers mostly make mediocre decisions, typically because of poor incentives (gaming story points).

in every company i've been at that is larger than a handful of people that all know each other, a separate product org is a requirement if you want a product with broad appeal.

i'm not sure what your complaint about the product backlog is. product people should be generating a large backlog. that is literally their job, is it not? it's only through a large backlog that you can say, hey we need more engineers. or hey, our vision doesn't match our capabilities -- refine it. and so on.

How exactly does a large backlog have a negative effect on velocity?

>engineers almost always make poor product decisions

You seem to be misinterpreting my thoughts as being against the idea of a product manager role. That's not what I mean. I'm talking about product as a separate autonomous org with a CPO, versus embedded PMs reporting to EMs alongside the rest of the product development team. I have similar, though less strong, feelings about Design as a separate org as well, for many of the same reasons (communication overhead/bottlenecks).

With regard to backlog, there is actually some capacity planning math that can show that (unintuitively) backlog size negatively affects product delivery velocity. I'm not an expert there, I've just watched some internal tech talks about it in the past.

At a higher level, think about what happens when the business side requests a new feature, or a product change. What is the difference in terms of confidence of estimates that can be given if you have 20 tasks in the backlog, versus 200. Sure, for that one thing you can up the priority and jam it in above a bunch of other stuff. But then, once that starts happening to people where you prioritize a newer request above theirs, how does that affect their confidence in your planning ability on a longer timeline?

> in my (vast) experience

Lastly, maybe pump the brakes a bit here, boss. This statement doesn't make me trust you more, independent of your ideas. We're on a web forum, not in a board room.

>> in my (vast) experience

>Lastly, maybe pump the brakes a bit here, boss. This statement doesn't make me trust you more, independent of your ideas. We're on a web forum, not in a board room.

literally made me lol, thanks for that. i mean it in a good way, not a defensive sarcastic way. that particular phrase is funny. can't recall the movie that made it popular but it forces a smile.

i'm not trying to gain your trust. like 95% of posters, i just like the sound of my own voice. i could not care less what you do with the info ... and i shouldn't care. it's opinionated. if you agree with it, you already agreed with it. it's not like i'm trying to convince you that JWT is bad. i have no agenda.

i was just using the adjective to note that this is what i've seen over a long time in this industry. AFAICT most of HN is 25-somethings with hardly a clue so i felt it useful to note that my opinion doesn't come from the 2 jobs i've held since graduating. that's all. i wasn't trying to speak from a position of authority, so as to command respect.

i understand though why you reacted as such, as in retrospect it sure looks like the typical kind of comment, i'll admit that.

as to the rest of your reply, yup i misunderstood your argument.

as to priority churn, that's not a problem of the backlog per se, that's a function of poor management, or the simple state of being of an early startup. whether you have an actual backlog or not, the whiplash priorities are the problem and the backlog merely the embodiment. by removing the backlog, you haven't addressed the problem.

Great point! Compartmentalisation is one thing but in large orgs, everyone starts focusing on one metric they need to boost (backlogs or PRs or design mocks) and we have no idea how this will affect other teams. We just have good metrics to show.

Having an entire separate org whose sole job is to create backlog items inevitably ends up with 100s of items, 15-30% of which are "high" priority. Many of these will have out of date specs by the time engineering can pull them in.

I would much rather have product folks embedded in the engineering team. That way they can be working on making sure any issues on deck to be worked on next have up to date, clear requirements, and issues are prioritized correctly.

Having product people separated into their own organization almost always leads to a "throw it over the wall" situation.

You're not wrong about incentives, but an org where PMs have fully segregated duties from devs is exactly the organizational context that breeds disconnected engineers juicing their burndown chart. I mean what do you think is the predictable outcome from a PM whose main job is googling his competitors and stuffing high fantasy JIRA tickets in the engineering backlog based on his mystic customer divinations. Neither of these people has made contact with a customer in their lifetime.

agreed!

however that's not a [dys]function of simply having a product org, that's a problem with poorly qualified, poorly performing employee. or a poorly describe job function. usually with the boss/management similarly poorly equipped since they don't see past the metrics they themselves (usually) have established for "success".

i think like the GP, you are conflating poor execution of the concept/model with the deficiencies of the model itself. one does perhaps encourage the other, however it doesn't need to be that way and isn't inherent.

i mean, in 3 words, "haters gonna hate". meaning that people that are poor at execution are going to be poor at it no matter the model in which they are embedded. but when you do have a good product team, the product org (as a model) gives them the ability to maximize a less than ideal engineering team. of course, still there's many a slip twixt cup and lip.

What I wish is that companies had people specialized in handling issue tracking systems. Expecting developers to do this is absurdo, a lot of the work is just making sure that the ticket is not a duplicate, and similar issues.

On some level, I kind of wish the entire cottage industry of "issue tracking systems" would just go away. What's wrong with a simple Kanban board? What has ever been wrong with that? It seems to me like, in a lot of cases, engineers just lost their nerve in terms of confidently talking to sales people and the business side of the company, and couldn't deal with the (imo, healthy) tension any more. I understand that people want estimates and timelines and stuff like that, and those are totally reasonable. But flagellating ourselves over absurdly small timelines, and hand-wringing over tiny pieces of features of projects as the core driver for engineering productivity, just seems crazy to me. It seems a lot more like purely signalling to the business side some vague ideas about "commitment," or "hustle," or whatever without having to speak to "those obnoxious sales people."

By product org do you mean a silo of an organisation dedicated to one particular product (so if a company has five "apps" they have five siloes and five marketing teams five engineering teams and five board members ?

I understand it to mean that there is a part of the org (separate from the engineering team) that shapes the direction of the product; decides "these are the features we're going to implement, these are the issues we're going to address"; one way of looking at it is that their primary output is putting things in to the engineering team's backlog.

Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Software product management as a separate functional org from engineering.

Not like old-Dupont-style product orgs.

Aha - so you are saying there is a product manager (plus "org") whose job it is to produce big backlogs separate from the people who will implement them.

yeah that's never gonna work :-(