Three Essential Leadership Practices that Improve Team Ownership - Practice 2

Written by Pollyanna Pixton,

Practice 2: Prioritize Work Based on Business Value

Make sure your team understands the “what” and the “why” of their project, features and goals. Couch the “why” in terms of business value to the customer and business value to the business. What features differentiate your company in the marketplace and will increase market share? What features are parity and are needed to close gaps between you and the competition?

Your teams need to understand this to know where their solution needs to be betterthan the competition and where it needs to be just as good but not better. Get the team together with some sticky notes and for each feature, determine the differentiating or parity value to the business and the customer. Mark every story with a “D” or “P”. This will remind the team which story to not over-engineer and which stories deserve innovation and creativity.

Who has the best Web-based shopping experience? Amazon. So if your project has a shopping cart, it must be as good as Amazon’s but not better. One company I worked with required users to set up an account before they could even look at or search for products. Is this a great web-based shopping experience? Not even close. When it comes to important but parity features, mimic best in class and free up your resources for what you do better than anyone else.

While you are at it, have the team mark each feature as high, medium or low value for both the business and the customer. Validate this with the business and have a conversation about any differences. Business value is not a number. It’s a conversation--a collaboration with stakeholders and customers. Besides taking differentiating and parity into account, other non-quantifiable considerations must be considered--such as risks, flexibility, time to benefit, competition, dependencies, complexity and uncertainties.

Yes, cost and benefits do factor in, but only if we can use somewhat precise numbers. Otherwise, cost/benefit analysis can be gamed. You might have never seen this, but sometimes people use historical estimates, know what number the manager wants to hear and back into the value of the benefits. Never happens, right?

This combination of design goal (differentiating or parity), considerations and precise costs/benefits generates a prioritized list your team owns and that guides their decision making. Can things change? Absolutely. The prioritized list, which maps to epic stories, gets re-prioritized by market, business and customer changes. Suppose your competitor releases their product with your differentiating feature…it is now parity! (While I am thinking about it, does your team know who their competition is?)

Now, huddle up together again and reprioritize the list (backlog) as a team.