Tuesday 24 June 2008

Priority and Age of Conan

What is priority?

It is often easier to ask people about what they want first instead of asking them about priority. This often shows when you ask the product owner about what is important and they say that all is important. Then you might try to ask for what is the most important functionality. Then they normally have problems choosing which task it is, because they are all important. They all have high priority.

Here is a trick; Ask the product owner what they want first. What do they want in the next delivery? They usually pick the most important for them. If you have multiple product owners, then let them pick their different functionality and add it all together in to the sprintlog.

Now over to something I just recently noticed about priority and product owners over at the discussionboards for Funcom's new MMORPG: Age Of Conan (AoC). The game has been in the stores for about a month and hundreds of thousands have bought it already. If you read the posts on the forum you will quickly see that many of their customers are not satisfied about the product. Even though one should be careful to believe everything on discussion boards there is one thing that really is obvious. Many of the posts talk about priorities of bug fixes and new functionality. I wonder if Funcom listen to their product owners, who in my opinion is the customers that play the game. The last patches has been critisized for not delivering the bug fixes that are important to the product owners. There have been posts about new functionality that have no value for the product owners.

To have hundreds of thousand product owners is no easy task I can imagine, but I ask myself what would I do? It seems to me that they really need to involve the product owners and actually deliver value. I propose to make it possible to vote for issues on the discussion boards and make it visible that these are the most important issues. Then when the new patch arrive they actually deliver what the product owners thought most important.

Make a list (backlog).
Vote on items from the list (1 week or until next patch).
Put the items on the list in prioritized order.
Start at the top and work you way down.
Rince and repeat.

Any comments?