Ted, the CEO of a rising B2B SaaS company based in Nashville, sat in his office overlooking the bustling city streets. His company's marketing automation solution had been gaining traction, but he felt they needed to move faster to stay ahead in the competitive landscape. With a sense of urgency, he called Karina, the SVP of Product, into his office.
As Karina entered, Ted gestured for her to take a seat.
He rotated his chair in her direction, "Karina, we need to accelerate the roadmap." His voice carried a mix of concern and determination. "Why can’t we get more features out the door faster?"
Ted has approved the prioritization of features on the roadmap and their assignment to the Now/Next/Later release schedule. While he agrees with the strategic direction, he's eager to increase the development team's velocity. Despite multiple conversations with the head of engineering, progress on this front has been limited.
In competitive markets, the risk of falling behind and missing sales targets is ever-present. CEOs frequently look to new product leaders to drive faster roadmap execution by asking this question, "Why can’t we get more features out the door faster?". While we in Product can't directly influence the engineering team's velocity, we can optimize our contributions to the sprint process by ensuring we provide high-quality user stories in sufficient quantities.
The Product Team’s Sphere of Influence
As product managers, their primary responsibilities in sprint management include developing high-quality user stories, prioritizing the backlog, and ensuring stories are ready for refinement and sprint planning.
When they execute these activities effectively, they set the stage for smooth sprint execution, even though they don't directly control development velocity (If your company employs a combination of product managers and product owners, replace product managers with product owners).
While they don't control sprint execution, they can work closely with development teams to enhance collaboration and communication. This includes participating in story pointing sessions to provide context and clarity around user stories. Additionally, they should help clarify requirements during refinement and planning meetings to ensure everyone is aligned. Being available to answer questions during sprints is also crucial, as it fosters a supportive environment for developers.
Tracking Key Metrics
To identify areas for improvement, product managers should at least, monitor these several key metrics.
Rejection Rate
The user story rejection rate can indicate the quality of product manager story preparation. A high rejection rate may suggest that their stories need more refinement before being brought into sprints.
Carry-over Story Points
Carry-over story points can reveal insights into dev’s effort estimation accuracy. A high volume of carry-overs might suggest issues with the pointing process, the dev team's ability to accurately size stories, the sprint's story gating, or the team's self-assessment of its capacity.
Additionally, carry-overs may indicate that stories are overly ambitious or poorly defined. Comparing carried-over stories to rejected ones can help identify common patterns in their structure and completeness.
Average Size
Product manager should pay attention to the average size of accepted and rejected stories, as this can inform us about appropriate story scoping. A rule of thumb is to aim for atomic-size user stories to avoid size-related concerns.
Sprint Velocity
Tracking sprint velocity trends helps us understand team capacity and efficiency over time. This metric provides valuable insights into the team's performance and can help in future sprint planning. An increase in the team’s velocity can indicate, not only a familiarity with the domain of the product and technologies, but also team member familiarity.
In Conclusion
The Sprint is the engine driving both the development process and the company’s progress. Maximizing its output is crucial. While Product cannot directly increase development velocity, Product can facilitate efficient roadmap execution by focusing on the development of high-quality user stories, effective prioritization, and data-driven improvements. By doing so, Product can significantly contribute to creating an environment that accelerates the development team's product delivery without overstepping our boundaries.
Share this post