How to build a sustainable and continuous product conviction process for your team?

Many times before planning the year ahead, next quarter or even the next sprint I always have a long list of ideas that my team can work on. I experimented with several processes that can help me pick, validate, polish and prioritise next deliverables for my team.

Over the years I have realised, it always work best if my team already knows there is a thoughtful and meaningful process in place that will help us validate the ideas we should work on next. It has following benefits -

1. My team keeps me grounded, they know we follow a certain process to quantify the potential of an idea

2. It’s becomes easier to get stakeholder’s buy ins

3. Saves from making inconsistent tradeoff decisions

4. Prevents late stage blow off, when we forget why we were doing this in the first place

5. Helps with staying on track and under budget since now the team understand what is the focus.

Here is the approach I follow with my team to build a strong sense of product conviction. For each idea that is worth my time, I take four steps to build a strong case.

1. I start with understanding the Customer Value

2. Understanding the business impact

3. Getting a good sense of efforts required

4. Aligning with my leaders and key stakeholders