I am trying to bucketize things. Structure helps me reduce chaos and tackle things and get things done efficiently. Buckets help with clarity. At least for me.
When I look over the backlog, and what to focus on next – and this is for product work as well as for structuring my day, I am trying to bucketize my TODOs. The buckets give me a baseline for prioritization, and a sense of balance, because I can decide which items from which bucket need work most urgently.
- Finish what has been started: there’s nothing like bringing a feature or capability over the line and getting it into customer’s hands. You have already gone the 70% or so to move this TODO or feature along, all it takes is the finishing touches and you can plan for yielding the harvest.
- Explore new areas of growth/usage/<what pays the bills>: Sit down and do the work. Think about what next you have to embark on, to drive growth or usage with the feature. If you need to lay out a plan to engage customers to discover that, or do market research to see what the competition is moving to – or what the industry is doing – or what trends and developments are happening. Sit down, take in the various influences, and build a plan, and have it build. Hit the telemetry, customer feedback, support case data, talk to people.
- Enhance what we already have: as you release features and capabilities, there’s feedback to get along the way, about additional functional, the next enhancement or thoughts from customers and users what also, the feature could solve for them. While you already have a working feature, you may plan for and build additional features that increase reach and scenarios for your feature.
- Build a foundation that customers love: depending on your feature or solution area, customers may expect from you to build a platform they can build on, rather than feature after feature. These platformy things could be delivery of rich APIs, options for customizing user experience (both automation, as well as branding, wording, graphics) or improve reliability and scale. This could also mean you wrap a role-based-access-control model around your feature, add logging and auditing or rebuild or improve dependencies to other components for more efficiency or more stability.
- It’s got to be done, designed, fixed: listen to your Engineers and work with them to hear them out on what they feel needs doing, re-doing, designing and improved. This may that time is spent on building something that users not directly enjoy, but something that needs doing to stabilize the solution, add security, build an RBAC system around it, work on admin controls, add configurable options to turn things on and off – or build an alarm system if the system doesn’t perform any more or goes down ( – if it’s a cloud service).
And then, clearly there’s internal meetings, grooming the backlog and cleaning up work items, so it reflects the current work schedule, dependencies, priorities.
FRICKELSOFT 