If you’re like many managers: super busy, most items in your backlog are probably coming at you all the time. Which gives you very little space to organize your work priorities, and see their strategic value based on the resources they need, before you add them to your backlog. Right?
So, why use a Jira prioritization plugin you say?
Ideally, your Jira product backlog, or more generally, your work backlog should be a list of every work-related task your team is supposed to complete next and what the focus should be given the time frame. And beyond that. Be careful it doesn't turn into an open-ended list of random tasks.
User cases are endless
Often enough, priorities change so fast that managers fail to keep track simply because their process lacks clarity. It can also happen that changes are made at the executive level while the team continues to work on Jira stories or epics that are no longer important. So, how do you justify priorities in that case?
Not only is the situation a motivation breaker, it's also inefficient and an awful waste of resources. So, how do you ensure stakeholders are included in the prioritization process? Moreover, if your job is to understand your customer base and solve their short and long-term needs, how would you know which customer feedback to send to the product management team?
Quantifying the score
Our experience in project management has shown us that when dealing with time, budget and resource constraints, product managers and other managers work better with a process that allows them to score (or quantify) the overall strategic value of a feature or task against all others. Which would then help them determine the feature or task that can give their product the biggest strategic advantage. After all, project management is a science, right?
Why Foxly really is the best tool for prioritizing tasks in Jira
Other than the fact that Foxly’s UI and price are greatly appealing, its workflow super simple, and setup, the easiest, why would you choose Foxly to be your agile prioritization tool?
1. Stay up to date
Foxly is made for managers; in particular, product and project managers who want to remove uncertainty while they keep track of Jira projects and priorities.
Priority table
Foxly’s priority table features all of your project’s issues, with columns for the metrics being used and Jira priority scores. Users can also filter priorities, and/or edit metric values.
The interactive priority table is where stakeholders get together to agree upon the metrics, which are then used in the automatic calculation of a final priority score.
Real-time score update
Foxly ensures your Jira backlog is always up to date with real-time work items that flow seamlessly, and that your team is confident and in tune with the work that matters; no more working on something that isn’t valuable.
What about priorities that keep changing without communication? Well, with Foxly, input such as editing or ranking of issues can be made to the score from different stakeholders, even after the prioritization session is done. You and your team can update priorities anytime in the backlog by assigning a score for every issue, calculated based on a chosen score formula.
All users can see the important issues to pick up, while every update to metric values (i.e. the score) is done in real-time and is accessible to all.
2. Get transparency and structure
Foxly brings transparency and structure to any Jira backlog prioritization process. The team is always aware of priority changes and confident to be working on the most impactful issues; all stakeholders understand why something is defined as high priority.
Score panel in Jira issue
Priority metric values and issue scores can be accessed, imputed and edited directly from the issue view in Jira, with no need to ever access the backlog; this provides better context for tasks in Jira, i.e. how they fit the bigger picture.
3. Make data driven decisions
Different projects and organizations have varying requirements, which is why Foxly features five predefined priority list templates to help remove bias opinions from backlog meetings and encourage data-driven decisions. Other Jira prioritization plugins usually offer one or two templates.
Foxly's five pre-defined backlog prioritization templates
- ICE is the best method to prioritize new products, MVPs and Growth experiments.
- The RICE method was developed by Intercom for prioritizing features on the product roadmap; it is suitable for mature products with available product usage data.
- The WSJF method quantifies the “cost of delay” and is used in larger projects and organizations that use SAFe.
- The Value vs. Effort method teaches how to "get a big bang for the buck" with its value vs effort prioritization matrix.
- The Quick Wins method is a backlog prioritization method Jexo put together to score our Jira issues and access the prioritization phase of our Quick Wins Accelerator; it helps us figure out which quick wins to prioritize.
Priority Matrix
Other than using priority metrics and the interactive priority table to make the right decisions, you can make use of the priority quadrants chart to ensure the decisions made are the most impactful.
The Jira priority matrix in Foxly is a X,Y chart built using score or metric values. Split midway to define four quadrants with respective values for X and Y, the priority matrix helps visualize all backlog priorities while highlighting the low hanging fruits to tackle first.
4. Create your own process
Customize your template
Aside from the five predefined templates mentioned above, Foxly allows you to customize your metrics and the score formula to make sure your prioritization is 100% tailored to the requirements of your project or organization.
Metrics (such as effort or reach) are fully customizable, and each one of them is given a value which is then used in a customizable formula that calculates the final score for every issue in your Jira backlog.
Standardize your process and integrate with Jira
Standardize your backlog prioritization process using data metrics and real-time priority scoring, and manage all of your prioritization processes in Jira - where the latest priority updates are automatically projected; metrics are editable in both, the issue detail panel and the table view.
Simplify your work
Foxly is created for those who'd rather skip the overhead of dealing with a complicated prioritization process, and have priorities embedded nicely into the tasks themselves, so they can manage backlog priorities exactly from where they work.
Thanks to Foxly, every item on your Jira backlog can now align with a strategy. You'll find it much easier to review your list on a regular basis, and determine whether new information such as a hot fix demands you visit your backlog priorities again.
Most importantly, say goodbye to playing "guess" with your prioritized product backlog; you’ll be making priority decisions systematically, while including your team in the process. If that's not perfect, I don't know what is.