How do you track product decisions?

Stas Voronov
9 replies
I'm always afraid to lose product decisions and go in the wrong direction. Okay, in a small startup it can be okay. But what if you have several teams and several stakeholders? What tools or frameworks do you use to avoid it?

Replies

Jen Fox
The ABCs of product "always be capturing" lol. For me, where I capture decisions depends on the impact of the decision: does it impact the overall product strategy? the product development process? a specific feature or epic? And it's important to establish and socialise a source of truth for documented product decisions - this is regardless of whether you are in a startup or a big corp. For product strategy or high level direction our source of truth is the product roadmap. If you practice product requirement documents, they can also live there. For features and epics, our source of truth for product decisions is the user story. Whether the discussion is happening in Slack, email or in grooming - the user story captures decisions on features. If you do not practice user stories, the product requirements doc or engineering documentation works well. For development processes, we have a team handbook where our process, definitions and protocols live. I'll make the updates there so any current or new team members can access it at any time. I also practice - what I like to call - a "verbal handshake" whereby all the stakeholders and contributors in the decision making process verbally agree to the decision. I do this at the very end of the discussion and summarise the decision like... "Okay, for X we are deciding to move forward with Y and Z. Are we all in agreement?" This practice comes in hand when a decision is being made very quickly where it is easier to misunderstand a directional change. Once a decision is made and the source of truth is updated (or created), I socialise it to the group and link to the artefact. Hope this helps!
Stas Voronov
@jennifersafox Nice! Thanks for such a detailed description! Could you tell me, how big is your team?
Stas Voronov
@jennifersafox Also, where do you store user stories and handbook?
Jen Fox
@stas_voronov my current team is around around 10 people. however, I've used these methods with teams over 20+.
Jen Fox
@stas_voronov User stories live in the backlog/icebox and the handbook lives on a shared drive in the cloud with other team/organisation documentation :)
Stas Voronov
@jennifersafox Is it a big deal to keep everything up to date?