FY22-Q4: Product Planning: Epic category JTBD validation
🎯 What’s this issue all about?
We must validate the JTBD for our Epic solution so that we may complete CM scorecarding for next quarter.
From gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com#12492 (closed)
🤝 Focus persona
Secondary persona
Updates to Plan JTBD
These are jobs that Epics support:
Map business and portfolio plans to market opportunities
- When visualizing the plan of how my strategy will be implemented, I want to display how prioritized items cascade up toward larger vision and business objectives, so I can increase alignment on the overall impact and importance of even the most granular items within my plan.
- When visualizing the plan of how my strategy will be implemented, I want to display how prioritized items cascade up toward larger vision and business objectives, so I can increase alignment on the overall impact and importance of even the most granular items within my plan.
Plan and Collaborate On Value Delivery
- When splitting prioritized initiatives or features into requirements, I want to group related pieces of value and surface dependencies, so I can maximize alignment on the scope of a business goal and efficiently plan its delivery.
- When estimating work during refinement, I want to validate that requirements are valuable and discrete, so I can increase the amount of value delivered with the least effort.
Report On Output
- When monitoring progress, I want to ensure the current scope and status of work are thoroughly captured, so I can increase the accuracy of my reporting and maintain trust with stakeholders.
Epics insights
From https://dovetailapp.com/projects/1OlV4YyyQ2FIX7rQCuXvbM/insights/present/I32cBsIfwKp5VP0ZglkGv
Epics can be thought of as high-level (business) requirements. They are a type of container or folder for many related work items that can be organized in a hierarchy in order to give a sense of the action plan or flow of events. These related work items are smaller pieces of value that contribute toward the high-level business requirement (epic) and can help divide up work without losing sight of the overall goal(s).
When:
- (Parker) Receiving or discussing or collaborating on a requirement or some business goals-
- (Parker & stakeholder) Tracking progress or completion of a feature-
- (Delaney & Sasha & Parker) Assigning myself to a work item that will accomplish a business requirement-
Epics should:
- Link to all the stories that are part of the epic / business requirement-
- Map the overview of goals & functionality of the feature in an understandable way-
- Break goals / business requirements up into sizeable chunks that deliver value -
- Make business requirements visible-
So that:
- There's one place to see the progress of all the components / aspects of a feature.
- Have information needed for a dev team or a business analyst or anyone else on the leadership team to understand what the feature will do.
- The full scope of a feature / business requirement can be viewed in one place.
- The team can accomplish the goals of the project.
- The team has / can access the business requirements they need in order to get started.
- We can deliver value.
- Everybody knows what is happening (at) every time.
JTBD insights:
Make smaller tasks (stories, issues) easier to access and track in one place. Help align tasks in a tool. Help correlate tasks to a larger goal in whichever place they are viewed (eg Board, item itself). Help surface the progress toward done of a larger goal. I know everything that we are planning on working on.
Last time used
- Scenario: Used an epic because they are updating the navigation of their website. This was a big project.
- They broke down a large project into multiple stories that we contained in an overall epic. This made the stories easy to find and easy to access because everything was in one place for anyone interested in the topic.
- Epics are nice because work can be tracked in one place.
- Epics help viewers see completeness or progress of a goal.
- I correlate tickets to epics and can see that correlation across the product (Jira). For example, I can see tickets belong to an epic moving across a board.
- We use an epic on all the sprints that we have. Every time that we receive a new requirement, we put it inside an epic .
- We first try to discover the main idea of the epic and fill out the description of the epic.
- When we start slicing, we create the stories inside of the epic.
Risk of having no epics
- The main risk of not having an epic would be that your work is not being tracked in the system that you use to track other work. You'd be keeping a separate list outside of the system and having to manually update it.
- Not using epics would cause you to be unaligned with the other work in the tool (eg Jira) which would require double updating things. The reality of work would not be aligned. The full scope couldn’t be viewed in one place.
- If I didn’t have Epics I would create stories directly. It could be a risk for a lack of information between the Project Managers and the Business Analyst especially.
Main goal of an epic
- If Epics could do only one thing it would be to link to all the stories that were part of the epic, so that there's just one place to see the progress of all the components of it.
- I think the main goal is to map the the overview of functionality in an understandable way, and to have a minimal amount of information needed for a dev team or a business analyst or anyone else on the leadership team to understand what the feature will do. That's the main purpose of the epic.
General
- Break up goals into size-able chunks so that we can deliver value
- Making sure the team has business requirements they need in order to get started.
- I want to make sure that people are involved basically from the beginning and that they feel ownership in this project from the beginning. Nobody is handed a fully-baked proposal to build.
- Everybody should be know what is happening (at) every time.
- Delivering value, and makes sure you are delivering in a way that makes sense to both business and customers - it is consistent delivers value, and leads to better user experience. - Agile Coach
- Breaking down this high-level goals into, and then using a tool like let's say JIRA to help me explain what's going on with them. It's usually easier to kind of just give a high level view in a deck or something like that, because the people that you're providing this to don't need to drill down into the levels of granularity that keeping it in JIRA or something like that. With that being said, if we wanted to then certainly it would be nice to have like a, an epic view, like where the epic ticket is. You see some progress there and it can have certain dates and documentation and decks and all that.
- I'll try to explain how to build some of the steps of the development, and first understand the whole business case and then understand the technical side as well. And then slice the stories and start to development to so they can accomplish the goals of this project.
📚 Resources
- Dovetail project: https://dovetailapp.com/projects/1OlV4YyyQ2FIX7rQCuXvbM/readme
- Screener & questions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oZvhQ-zX-9ICNWZ0n-JCFCxzeOIQgQa4B7Ek4OPD988/edit?usp=sharing
- Actionable insights: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/346393 , https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/336935 , https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338089
- Handbook update: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!87491 (merged)