Product Management

To compliment the Product Roadmap, there should be a prioritised product ‘Feature Backlog’ which gives both stakeholders and the development teams a detailed overview of the Product Roadmap items still at that high level (Epics / Product Iterations).

If you use JIRA to manage your software delivery projects and you have your product roadmap items at an Epic level, then you’re able to simply setup a Kanban board with just one column called ‘Feature Backlog’ with a filter set to show only Epics and Epics which are ‘in progress’ or ‘to do’.

To visualise the feature backlog in a better way than the Kanban board, it’s possible to also show that same JIRA epic search filter across the likes of Confluence or Aha! where you can specify what JIRA fields to show.

Depending on your custom fields in JIRA, looking at the Feature Backlog should give stakeholders and development teams working on the product a high level (iteration / epic) idea of:

• Priority order of all epics / iterations
• Status – what’s in progress, planned or to do
• Business value – whether it’s driving x incremental revenue, saving x money, avoiding x fees, meeting regulatory requirements, contract deadlines, tech debt, advancing technology etc
• Description of the iteration / problem you’re solving
• Delivery date which should match the dates on the product roadmap
• Size of work

The Feature Backlog is a great way of showcasing at a high level the value of the product iterations which are currently being worked on and what’s planned in the next twelve months.

The Feature Backlog also helps the development teams understand the details of what problems are upcoming to solve, so they’re able to think about how to approach each epic / product iteration well in advance.