![]() You might have very detailed feature layouts that include all sorts of pertinent information. The exact components vary depending on what you are building and how your team works. Time frame: Typically weeks, months, or quarters - depending on the number of features within the epic.įeatures are epics broken down into user-focused parts. Scope: Details on what the team will design, build, and release. May cover what the user will be able to accomplish with the new set of features as well as when the work will be delivered. But expect to see:Īssociated goal and initiative: Product goals and the initiative the epic rolls up to.ĭescription: How the related features come together to deliver a new experience to customers. Time frame: Quarters or yearly halves - often aligned to strategic planning periods or when budgets are allocated.Įpics can range from in-depth descriptions like what you would find in a traditional product requirements document (PRD) to a quick summary of a feature set. Initiatives set a high-level direction for the product and can have all kinds of details baked in, including:Īssociated goal: Business or product goal(s) that the initiative supports.ĭescription: Summary or theme and how the work will help you realize your goals, usually involving cross-functional responsibilities and resources needed. In the example above, each dashboard enhancement - such as the ability to add different types of reports and roadmaps or filter by workspace - can be defined as an individual feature within the epic. This effort (or epic) was broken down into several features.įeatures are discrete pieces of functionality that provide a corresponding benefit to the user. For example, last year we unveiled new interactive dashboards in Aha! Roadmaps so that customers could organize reports, charts, and custom roadmaps into a single view. Once set, initiatives are fairly fixed although the supporting epics and features will evolve as you go.Įpics are focused on major areas of functionality and help define what a user will experience. Business initiatives help you achieve high-level company goals, while product initiatives include work that impacts customers - such as new sets of features or performance improvements. Initiatives are key pieces of strategy, along with vision and goals. Is an initiative really just a big project? Is an epic just a long user story? So let's break down the differences between initiatives, epics, and features even further: Purpose What matters is the "why" behind the structure.īut there can still be confusion - particularly between initiatives and epics. It really does not matter what terminology you choose - you could use any word really. You might encounter others like specifications, user stories, and tasks. There are some other structural layers here - such as requirements (granular parts of a feature that must be implemented) and releases (the containers for work that will be delivered in a specific time frame). Initiatives: Areas of investment that support overall business and product goalsĮpics: Larger bodies of work that are comprised of many featuresįeatures: Functional components of the product that support specific use cases ![]() And features are specific capabilities or functionality that you deliver to end-users - problems you solve that add value for customers and for the business. Epics contain features that span multiple releases and help deliver on the initiatives. ![]() Here I will focus primarily on how initiatives are used in product management, rather than for major efforts at the company level. Initiatives are major areas of investment that contain epics or high-level themes of delivery needed to achieve specific goals. If you are solely focused on the labels in the taxonomy, then you are likely spending more time on the process - how the work will get done - than why you are doing it in the first place.īut for the sake of this post, let's start with some definitions. There are plenty of agile or agile-adjacent think pieces that go into intense granularity about the "right" and "wrong" way to think about and manage work. However you organize your work, you need a view of how everything rolls up to your strategic goals. Grouping units of work into initiatives, epics, and features provides a structure that helps you align on what you will deliver and why it matters. The best product managers I know take pride in bringing order to product plans. ![]() Have you ever worked with a disorganized product manager? It almost sounds like an oxymoron. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |