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Although the approach seems fine, I don't think it creates an advantage. The situation is there are tickets in progress that have engineering consequences and t

• idopmstuff 3y ago
  > I recommend using the backlog as a diplomatic tool and a polite way of letting things get lost. I hate this approach. I totally get it, to be clear. I've done it. But I hate it. It's a sign of a really bad culture if you have to placate people in this way. If your senior leadership is clearly communicating priorities, you should be able to say, "Look, this is an interesting idea, but as you know this quarter we're very focused on X, and this just doesn't align with that. The best route to get this done is to give your feedback in the next planning process and see if you can push Y to be a priority, then we can definitely talk about getting this on the roadmap." A huge part of the job of a PM is to say no. If people aren't able to take a no on feature requests, there's a problem somewhere. Maybe it's with the way you're delivering it, maybe it's with the overall culture or maybe it's with the person making the request. Whatever the issue is, though, it's better to deal with it and create an environment where people understand that sometimes their requests will get declined for valid reasons.
  • danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    So nothing goes in the backlog? How do you keep track of ideas that might make sense but aren't high priority right now? If you have an idea to do X, and then over 2 years you find lots of customers asking for it and it's a few weeks work, how does that get captured somewhere?
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      If history is a guide then the standard approach is: Get a stable product and then wait till someone else does something innovative and copy that.
    • milesskorpen 3y ago
      There are whole classes of software that are built around aggregating and storing customer feedback in a more-raw format than JIRA tickets. See: Prodpad or Productboard or even JIRA product discovery.
      • esafak 3y ago
        Do you find that adds value, rather than creating another silo that basically serves the same purpose? What do you use and what are its top features?
        • milesskorpen 3y ago
          I use ProductBoard. It’s not perfect, but it basically does a good job of making it easy to get feedback into the tool, and then tag/sort/organize it in a variety of ways. At this point we’ve got 5k “insights” all tied to customers & prospects. It helps us identify smaller things we might have missed, and makes it really easy to get a lot of historical feedback quickly when we do decide to tackle a feature.
        • nolongerthere 3y ago
          If done right it forces the asker to really think about and flesh out their idea, most ticket systems don’t necessarily enforce great descriptive hygiene. But if you use an idea portal you can force the requester to answer a bunch of questions with min char counts that make them really think about the idea, then they can get feedback from others who might have a similar problem. Additionally most other channels for receiving feedback are unstructured and won’t result in high quality feedback, nor an accurate description of the problem, these types of tools have a much better chance of getting real serious feedback, bec only the ones who really care will persevere through all the questions. If you just drop every customer email complaining about a supposed problem into a ticket in your company’s private queue, no one but internal employees will ever see it (and 99% of those won’t ever notice it or read it) but if you give your users a place to vent and discuss their ideas (with moderation of course) you can have a pretty powerful new idea/roadmap tool.
• jfoutz 3y ago
  One manager had regular backlog grooming. Friday afternoon, go through them all. Some would age out, be not relevant or whatever and be closed. Some kicked to next quarter. But a lot actually happened. Oh, we got pages, let’s do this now. Seemed super effective.