I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com

Prioritisation
Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in SaaS at 1:36 am on Wednesday, 23 May 2007

Alastair Grigg has been on the team now as COO for a month or so and has really helped us establish our processes as we scale up.

Ali discussed this at the SaaS conference earlier in the week and I thought it was worth sharing wider.

Product Management

We are currently working on fairly rapid release cycles of 2-4 weeks. We are getting great feedback from customers and also have a roadmap that we want to make sure we keep progressing towards. For a given level of resources we have a level of capacity. Inevitably this leads to a prioritization debate which I can assure you is very good sport.

We physically manage this by having weekly Product Steering Group meetings where we review this feedback, customer queries, any support issues and sales team feedback.

Ali came up with a model that has really helped us with managing this process.

The work program for the current release we are working on and the release following is largely locked down and generally not open to changes unless there is a major need. This workstream then is largely a Project Management activity. We know what needs to be done and this is managed accordingly. This gives our development team a level of certainty on what they are doing.

The content of the next few release after that are where we have the debate about what comes next. This is Product Management. It is where we balance tactical and strategic initiatives by selecting the features we are going to work on and release. This is where the Priorization Debate occurs.

In order to make sure that we are executing our long term strategy we also record the basic themes of the Releases that are a few months out. This is Product Strategy which shapes the long term Roadmap.

As we add more resources we can introduce more parallel workstreams and accelerate delivery of the roadmap.

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Comments(1)

    Comment by What's next? « Rowan Simpson at 6:08 pm on 23 May 2007

    [...] will be head of product strategy. Rod posted earlier today about how they (we!) are dealing with prioritisation and product development, which explains quite nicely where this role fits into the bigger [...]