As a product team, the most fundamental question that you will have is “what to build?”. However, this leads to another question: “How do we know what is the right thing to build?” In my experience, rushing into the process of creating a product backlog which will have a list of features is not the most effective approach.

While frameworks like OKR and Lean value tree have helped to be more objective, one key challenge is that it starts from metrics/business outcomes. It has helped in moving from ‘feature jockey ’ approach to be more outcome oriented. But this can make our product roadmap more inclined towards achieving product metrics and not allow us to derive the real customer motivations.

That’s why I suggest balancing the customer insights/product outcomes in our visioning/roadmapping exercise through my approach of creating an “Opportunity backlog” instead of a product backlog. This forces us to think only in the problem space.

The opportunity backlog has three main parts to it

a) Customer Motivations: The first part involves identifying customer pains through primary research and converting them into potential opportunities to solve

b) Business vision : Whats the purpose of your product’s existence ? Break down your business vision into opportunities.

c) Data insights: Finally, if you have an existing product, what does your data teach you? if you are building a new product, what does the data from the market/competition teach?

Now I recommend taking the list of curated opportunities from the three lenses (Impact, evidence & effort) and prioritising them. This will help you determine what needs to be built first versus what can wait until later. For each opportunity, you can begin by mapping out the following as high or low priority.

• Impact : measurable, outcome oriented ( eg: % improvement of x)
• Evidence: Do you have proof that this opportunity will work ( it can be a inspiration from the competition or your professional experience or backed by strong data)
• Effort: How much time will be taken to build this. This is at a high level as we have not yet gone to solution. The intent here is to filter the right opportunity based on guesstimate.

Opportunity which has the high impact, high evidence and low effort — this is a clear winner to start in the next sprint.But there are more to this which i will cover in a separate article.