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4 minute read
Your product teams consist of talented and capable individuals who are dedicated to creating amazing products. Their skills make it possible to produce and launch established models while generating consistent suggestions to improve future iterations.
With these creative and talented teams comes a flood of good ideas competing for the attention of product management. This mountain of ideas requires a system of organization to prevent missed opportunities. The most effective product managers implement a process to receive suggestions where they can use a set formula to compare and score the ideas and get alignment on priorities faster. Once an idea has a score, it’s easier to decide which ones to prioritize and approve.
Traditionally, this process requires hours of discussions, information circulation, and cross-collaborative meetings. While technology cannot replace the cross-functional dynamic of collaborative team meetings, you can use technology to streamline and speed up the entire process. Our latest feature makes it simpler than ever to collect ideas, assign scores, and strategically prioritize the list.
Innovation in Product Management
At Gocious, we're committed to simplifying product management tasks for everyone involved. With our latest feature release, product managers can easily continue managing the roadmaps in their product portfolio while also scoring and prioritizing ideas with data-driven decisions.
Our new Capability Score and Templates feature can simplify your product teams' scoring and prioritization process. Each team can now create its own, separate board to discuss ideas, score features, and discuss which ones should be prioritized over others. This gives each of your teams autonomy to use the scoring formula that works for them and prioritize what keeps them aligned with the product scope and the greater vision.
Follow along with Gwen, the product manager at an electronics company, as an example user case story.
Centralize the Idea Backlog
Meet Gwen, the director of product management at an electronics company. Gwen oversees a portfolio of mobile devices and the various teams working on them, including modules shared across product lines. Each product in the portfolio receives suggestions for improvements and new features on a regular basis, creating quite a backlog.
Each idea requires evaluation, scoring, and prioritization. Normally, this process consumes many hours in Gwen's day-to-day schedule, from gathering data and bringing together the right people to discuss, debate, and decide how to score the ideas. From there, she must also lead the decision on which ideas receive priority and then present her rationale to the executives.
Our new Capability Score feature allows all ideas and suggestions to be entered and managed in a central location. Gwen can have confidence that the information she needs is securely stored in a way that's easy to present to her executives.
Streamline the Scoring Process
Having a centralized place to store and manage incoming ideas makes Gwen's workload much easier. The next step where Gwen could use additional support is in the scoring process. She'll need to gather different data points based on the scoring method she wants to use. This will involve talking directly to her product teams and consulting different sources to find the best answers.
While Gwen might be using one formula for her engineering team, the head of design and user experience may be using another set of parameters to score their ideas. With Gocious, each team can create independent boards and use the scoring system that works best for their needs.
Generating a Score
Because Gwen's department uses the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for product development, she uses the SAFe-recommended formula for scoring ideas: WSFJ (Weighted Shortest Job First). The overall goal of this formula for scoring (and most other scoring methods) is to determine which idea will deliver the most value to the customer while driving the business forward.
WSJF calculates a score based on the cost of delay divided by the job duration. To make this calculation and generate a score for each idea, Gwen must ensure each item in the list has the relevant data. Rather than spend hours seeking out these answers, collecting them into manually created charts and spreadsheets, Gwen uses Gocious to gather the details, store the information, and automatically generate scores.
Setting Up the Formula
Each formula uses a set of attributes to provide a score. In our new Capability Scores feature, Gwen can easily create her formula by assigning attributes to each portion. For example, she can create the formula Cost of Delay / Job Duration and then assign the following attributes:
Cost of Delay = User Business Value + Time Criticality + Risk Reduction
Job Duration = Job Size
In Gwen's case, she'll need to enter values for these four attributes to generate a score for each item on her list automatically. Once she's done, she can easily share and present to her teams a comparison of all ideas and their scores.
The score is generated once these fields are filled in. If you accidentally miss one, you'll receive an alert that the field needs a value before the score is given. From there, Gwen can view her list of ideas and their scores for a clear comparison overview.
Increase Autonomy in Your Teams
While most of Gwen's teams are working in SAFe Agile, she also has hardware teams that mostly use a form of waterfall project management to manage the stages of development. This differentiation means that her hardware teams will want to keep their product ideas separate from the software ideas. Because Gwen is using Gocious, she can keep separate boards for each department and create different formulas for each board, making it easier to collaborate with her different teams.
With our Capability Score feature, product managers can create separate templates for each team. This allows managers of complex products, like Gwen, to separate the ideas, capability types, and scoring formula templates. It also gives each team the autonomy to collect the information that matters most for their part of a product, reducing the workload on Gwen's plate.
Improve Prioritization
Once Gwen and her cross-collaborative team meet to agree on the scoring idea list, the next step is to prioritize it. Just because an idea has a high score does not guarantee it will be at the top of the priority list. Gwen needs to identify the ideas that drive the business forward and provide value to the customer while managing bias within her team. The products that match this description and have a high score are more likely to be prioritized.
Now that Gwen can sort ideas, rank them, and assign them to a column on the prioritization screen, she cannot imagine returning to documents, charts, or even hand-written notes. All she needs to do is present her screen to the room and drag and drop the ideas into their priority column in real time with her team.
Give Stronger Presentations
During meetings with the executives in her company, Gwen confidently presents her plan for the product along with her rationale for her decisions. She uses the professional, clear, and easy-to-view dashboards inside the Gocious product roadmap management software, saving herself hours of time she would otherwise spend making a presentation from scratch.
Helping You Focus and Deliver on the Needs of Your Customers
Gocious product roadmap management software was built with your product management needs in mind. Our robust, innovative software is the roadmap management tool that gives you all the answers you need to manage your portfolio of products. Our clients love the clean visuals, useful integrations, and our continuous innovation of features that save you time and improve transparency between teams.
Book your free demo to see how using Gocious product roadmap management software can transform the daily work of your product managers.