How to Measure User Sentiment to Prioritize Your Product Backlog

Presented by Peter Moon

Slides from the presentation

How do you fit ten pounds of software development into a five-pound bag? Prioritizing your backlog just might be the single most important decision software development teams can make. It sounds simple - work on the things that will deliver the most value. But which stories, features, and requirements, exactly, meet the criteria? Should we optimize for durability? Flexibility? Simplicity? Modern experiences? Breakthrough features? Resilience?

Ultimately, great products deliver great experiences for real people. Measuring how users feel about the product, even before it’s built, can drive alignment among stakeholders, focus teams on the right work, encourage creativity and autonomy, and increase collaboration. Net Promoter Score measures advocacy. NSAT measures satisfaction. Scraping social media can give you some insights for the portion of your users who express themselves there. Peter will illustrate the mechanics of an alternative approach to measuring sentiment and how to use those metrics to focus your backlog on the things that are most important.

"Life is too short to build something nobody wants." - Ash Maurya

Peter Moon

Peter Moon is a Managing Partner at Navicet, a design consultancy that helps teams develop design capabilities into a competitive advantage. Peter has over 30 years of commercial software design and IT management experience. He is a 13-year veteran of Microsoft and held such positions as Director of Tools for North America Services, Engineering PUM, Quality Director, and Consulting Engagement Manager where he drove some of the largest services engagements in North America. While at Microsoft, Peter developed new practices for IT software design and drove global adoption for over 10,000 IT pros. He has been a speaker at numerous industry conferences, has coached hundreds of teams to achieve better business results through proven practices in design, requirements, risk and project management and has served on Microsoft IT’s Architectural and Standards review boards. Peter launched Navicet with a group of like-minded practitioners in 2014 to serve customers in the Puget Sound area who believe in the power of design to transform business.