Product Management

No matter what product a development team works on, there will often be a big backlog full of high priority customer-centric / commercial work to deliver, technical improvements to make, bug fixing, getting after the next generation technology and security / regulatory / compliance work, so it’s important that there’s clarity over what the specific headline goals are for the development team to achieve over the next sprint / time period.

Some key points when setting goals:

• They should be specific, but also be accompanied by a high level summary of the bigger picture
• They should all be action-orientated
• Make sure your goals are measurable so you know if they’re done or not at the end of the period
• Indicate a period they’re valid for until they’re reviewed
• Share the goals with stakeholders and senior management, as well as the review of whether the goals were ‘done’ or ‘moved over to the next period’
• They should be realistic and the development team should agree to the goals

Setting frequent delivery goals is not only important so that the right focus is being spent on the right things which will increase the likelihood of making progress on solving the highest priority problems, but it also gives visibility of the overall progress made on product iterations and highlights problems in the process if goals are frequently not met, whether it’s due to build pipeline / environment issues or last minute dependencies for example, which should be discussed in the retrospective.

Setting delivery goals, reviewing, celebrating and learning from them should be the norm like it is when everyone’s objectives are set across the wider business.