Scope Management is the Key to Stay on Track

Scope management is a key factor in protecting a project's deadline and budget from any negative deviations. Scope management is one of the most important job descriptions of a product manager because as a product manager you must both satisfy all stakeholders equally and give users/customers what they want. While doing all this, you should also make sure that your company meets the commitments made.

And yes, everything will not always go well. It can be quite tough to be able to do scope management well, especially in B2B products. There will always be sudden requests from the customer, last-minute change requests, and unforeseen features. The best way to handle this situation is to have a good backlog. In this way, prioritization can be made between pending tasks, and deviation from the roadmap is minimized.

Now let's examine the tips on how to do this through the flow diagram below. I believe this figure will guide you and be helpful.

If the incoming request is not aligned with the vision of the product, it should be eliminated without any delay. Of course, the issue of how product vision is determined is important here, but we will discuss it another time.

In the second step, we need to look at how many users it will benefit. In addition, if there is no validated data and it is a request that will not bring much revenue, we can delay it. As a result, we set this job as a low priority by putting it at the bottom of our backlog list.

Next, we should see if there is a prerequisite task to improve this feature. In this case, the development effort will increase anyway. We can also try to reduce the scope of the incoming request by clipping it. Then, we should analyze how it would be if we deploy this feature, not now. If none of them are successful, we can't go any further and we place this request mid-line in the backlog.

If it's a really important request and has passed all the filters above, but if it's not worth the time we're currently working on it and it's not worth the time, we should put it at the top of our backlog.

While doing all this, communication with the stakeholder is very important, the person in front of you may not always have the technical competencies to fully understand the issues you are talking about. Therefore, it is necessary to have strong intrapersonal skills while doing all these. At the very least, if you have a template for scope management and try to implement it, I'm sure you'll get good results.