From the vision of a product to the MVP backlog

First of all, congratulations on getting/finding the opportunity to work on something from scratch! It’s a rare beauty these days!

If you’re doing this for the first time, this can be an overwhelming as well as a daunting task. But do not worry, through this article, I will try to help you as much as possible. The following steps will help you in your discovery phase to get a well formed product backlog:

Identify the problem that this product is going to solve:

It can be as simple as allowing the commodities to be accessible for their consumers like clothes for online shoppers or a simple guide for farmers to maximize their profits on crops.

Who are the target audience & what does their sample profile look like:

You need to answer who will be using this product. Categorize your audiences into 3 personas and create a profile for each of these personas. Pick an individual belonging to that profile and fill out the following template:

Identify the target personas for MVP/Beta version:

Before identifying MVP personas, lets set the expectation of MVP rightly. The purpose of an MVP is to minimize risk by validating your assumptions with minimal investment. With that said, picking MVP Personas can be a tricky task. Thankfully, data stats can come to our rescue here. Use the following a checklist against each of the persona profile and provide the data next to it.

1. Is this persona part of one full flow? For example, in eCommerce, selection of product to the payment, is one full flow:

2. Number of major goals of this persona

3. Number of minimum needs to reach each major goal of this persona:

4. Time to market for these needs:

5. Are there internal users that can be included for user testing?:

If the answers to above/or at least most of the above lies in “Yes” and on lower end of numeric value, for the respective profile, then that’s something you should target for your MVP.

Don’t forget to re- validate your understanding at each and every step with your client/customer/product manager.

Continuous assurance from your peers or your clients will help you to keep true to your path. Also, not to mention, it will call out the flaws/misunderstandings way early in the phase.

Create user flow/journeys for the chosen Personas:

This is actually a very important step. You need to put yourself in shoes of the persona you’re targeting and create a path in your product for the user to reach his goal. It sounds simple but while working on it, you’d realize there might be different branches in a single path that alters the destination. The below sample might help make things clearer:

Generate the user story map

Now that you have identified major goals of the persona & are also aware about the minimum needs/activities to reach the goal, map it out in the following template:

And voila! Pick out the Features as Epics & Details as User Stories

for your product backlog!

Now, I am definitely not an expert, but I am hoping this article might help many of you to structure the process of going from “Vision” to the “Product Backlog” in your product discovery phase.

If you’ve liked the article or if it has helped you even remotely, please do leave a comment. It would encourage me to go for more content generation like this.