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Being a Product Owner (PO) is not the most easy role on a (Scrum) project. In fact, it might be the hardest role. POs are easily faced with months and months of requirements in the backlog. They are supposed to prioritize this huge list (“is requirement XYZ more or less important than requirement ABC?”), making sure that the needs of stakeholders are met.

And please make sure there is enough ROI, dear Product Owner!

And attend the daily scrum to clarify any issues the development team has within the current iteration!

And prepare the next set of requirements for planning.

And… And… And so on.

Jeff Patton wrote an excellent article about the assumption that the Product Owner must possess super powers: The product owner and the product-shaped hole. Unfortunately, most Product Owners do not possess super powers. I might even say that not a single PO has them (since they are still exclusively used in comics and the like).

This post deals with one of the challenges a PO has: how to prioritize my backlog?

When asked to prioritize every requirement on a scale of 1 to 3, the following usually happens:

• 80% will end up as priority 1
• 10-15% as a priority 2
• the rest (if any) is priority 3.

That is not very helpful to determine what requirement(s) to work on next.

A useful approach in this situation is to limit the number of requirements that are allowed in priority 1 and 2. For example:

• 10 requirements are allowed priority 1
• 20 requirements are allowed priority 2
• the rest is priority 3

All priority 1 requirements must be ready for immediate scheduling in the next planning meeting. Suppose that 8 requirements fit for the next iteration, then all you have to do is:

• promote 8 requirements from priority 2 to 1 and;
• promote another 8 requirements from priority 3 to 2.

That is just a minor task compared to the task “rank every requirement against all others”. When you put the priority 1/2/3 boards on the wall with brown paper and postits, it provides visual focus as to what to work on next as well as a transparent overview of “what’s next” and “what’s almost next”.

Try it, you might like it!