I’ve been spending a lot of time helping one client with their 2011 Product Roadmap. Although we’re not “doing Agile,” I’ve introduced them to the product backlog. So far it’s been a powerful planning tool. So Scott Sehlhorst’s post on how to prioritize resonated with me. When creating a backlog, or managing features, you need to remember that feature priority is a tool to be used to plan your work. Don’t get too specific about the exact rank of individual items, and remember that the eventual order of implementation should reflect what from a business, technical, and user perspective.

When I took on my current job I was given an established product team and a mostly-new engineering team. We also had a brand new engineering manager, QA manager, and program manager working with us. Our job was to launch an all-new version of Toolbar while we maintained our existing versions and continued to support new corporate partners. Engineering and QA had just been moved overseas. We didn’t have any well-defined processes in place to build and maintain software.