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Product Owner Capacity Planning Gets a Boost From Aha!

Product lifecycle management is an important part of a product owner’s responsibilities. Understanding your delivery capacity and constraints is critical to building your release plan and roadmap. Aha! has introduced scenario planning to give product owners the ability to create and compare multiple release approaches based on team capacity and backlog priority.

Your roadmap contains the themes and goals for your product, which are then translated into a backlog of changes that enable the goals in your roadmap. Properly sizing and understanding your delivery team’s relative throughput is critical to planning your product releases. Even more importantly, capacity planning can help you prioritize your backlog based on what could be delivered within a target release.

Aha!’s new scenario planning takes this one step further. Rather than having to manually calculate options, Aha! allows you to create scenarios with different constraints and then analyze and compare each scenario to determine risk, utilization, or delivery date. The scenarios also allow the product owner to create different approaches to a release if they run into constraints, challenges, or changes in priority.

Our Take

• Decide on the system of record for capacity planning.
• Even if capacity planning is managed within your delivery platform, it should still be a consideration for your roadmap and release planning at the next higher level of change unit (theme, epic, or feature).
• The quality of your capacity planning is dependent on the detail in your roadmap and backlog and the accuracy of your team’s estimates.

Want to Know More?

• Build a Better Product Roadmap: Create a roadmap that suits your objectives, the characteristics of your product, and the environment it lives in.
• Build a Better Backlog: The quality of your product backlog is key to realizing the benefits of Agile.
• Transition to Product Delivery: Stop delivering projects. Start delivering products.
• Build a Better Product Owner: Strengthen the product owner role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities