Generating Business Value: Steps we have adopted?

How to assure product owners are able to generate Business Value by introducing new features in the products?

What steps can be followed?

How can we guide the product owner to ensure the product backlog is complete and the team has enough to go on to build a better product and solution which the customer is embraced?

The business value is the standard value measure used in business valuation.

PMBOK® defines business value as the entire value of the business; the total sum of all tangible and intangible elements.

The business value consists of :
1. Increase revenue
2. Decrease cost
3. Improve productivity
4. Differentiate the company
5. Improve client satisfaction
One of the major challenging questions every product owner faces during the product backlog creation is Business Value for each feature they introduced.
How to simplify these steps?
Though product owners prepare a lot of homework to come to inference about the business value, essentially this is a collaboration activity with many stakeholders in the product development team.
This is a checklist that mainly product owner and scrum master use for constructing product backlog.

Step No 1:

For preparing feature product backlog, the Product owner and later team members go through all these questions
Question 1: Who are our stakeholders? For our offering ( We list down all the information if required for each feature we are expanding)
Question 2: What are our business drivers? ( Based on this information, many potential features can be derived)
Question 3: What are our business vision?
Question 4: Who are our users ( We filled separate persona for all the users to understand their needs and aspirations)
Questions 5: What do our products need to accomplish? What problem our product solves?
Question 6: What Features hold the maximum Business Value? ( Our investment decision, features around those features, influence us)

Step No 2:

First few steps to which can help Product owners and the team to set up the discussion.

Considering there are new products or product features team members is seeking to build up, These question to be asked for each EPIC or Features planned for.

3 Questions to be asked

Question 1: What is the Major purpose of this Feature/EPIC?

Question 2: What are the various considerations team is factoring into?

Question 3: What are the cost and benefits of this feature/Epic?

Based on the brainstorming, decision, Actions, and Intentions need to capture.

e.g. Feature A — Number of Page visitors of our website, Feature B- Number of Page visitor our website who has clicked many of our offerings and converted into a buyer for our product.

For each feature, we have all these 3 questions filled and shared as a whole team.

Step No 3:

We walkthrough all these sources of value generation at a specific iteration to discover specific features from these areas connected to products

1. Expand Market Value :

1.1: Functionality that draws in a new group of customers. Expansion of the user base.

1.2: Porting an application to the other platform that increases product usability, performance, and ease of use.

1.3 Adding features that competitor does not have

1.4 Sell more unit by reaching maximum users

1.5 Charge higher price to obtain more revenue

1.6 Reduce the cost by providing better product features and service

2. Expand Customer Value:

2.1: Improving the usability of the product and solutions

2.2 Adding features which most of the customers are seeking for

3. Expand Efficiency Value :

3.1 Reduce the amount of an error in a task or increase speed

3.2 Increase the usability or quality of an application to reduce the load

3.3 Reduce the amount of time required to set up new customer environments

3.4 Decrease time to market

4. Expand Commercial Value :

4.1 A new version of a software package

4.2 A New piece of functionality

4.3 Changes that reduce operating cost

4.4 The customer will pay to acquire

5. Generate Future Value :

5.1 Investing in new ( Custom or open-source) Framework

5.2 Reducing technical debt in code to make future changes easy

6. Risk reduction :

6.1 develop or refine the hypothesis about the market

6.2 Prove technical assumption

7. Capability Building

7.1 Enable our team to do something we could not do before

7.2 Reduce or eliminate the need for low-value activity

With the above structural thought, we can come out with many features.

We also ask our customer, If there is only 1 user story to complete for a sprint, which that could be?

All the product features will be rank based on the

1 Critical

2 High

3 Moderate

4 Low

These steps help us to maintain our product backlog effectively sprint on sprint.