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?
2 comments:
Well... I place great mistrust in human voting or personal opinions in bug-reporting, generally. Fix the bugs that are costing you the most money!
It can be tricky to measure this. Rewarding the loudest whiner might not always be best approach. Each time someone encounters a bug, this is probably logged somewhere serverside (if not, I would say the game's bug "monitors" are inadequate). Trust the statistics of these logs, not human voters (this is related to my recent post on Evolutionary methods).
On the other hand, it would be wise of FunCom to ensure a good tone in their community by making sure the player's complaints are noticed, and critical bugs should be fixed quickly. But which bugs are critical? :)
Actually I agree with you on the issue of the loudest whiner. And I do think that visibility is the key to please the community.
Many people have already left the game due to bugs, lack of content, priority and other issues. This means that the issues are starting to cost them money.
They had two deliveries a week and it was clearly more than what FC could handle because of the new bugs introduced in each patch. Thus they have now slowed down to once a week. But still the visibility is very bad. They need to put up a roadmap and work hard on bigger issues and not on fixing tooltip's.
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