 notice there's a pile of handouts and some fake dollar notes for now you can just leave them as is they'll be needed for the group activity so we'll explain how how to use them feel free to pick up any of the index cards if you need to for writing any notes but everything else is gonna come in handy as we get into the exercises should we get started all right let's get started so our topic for today is beyond Moscow prioritization techniques for agile teams my name is Tarang Bakshi I work for ThoughtWorks as a project manager I'm Chirag I work at ThoughtWorks at our Pune office as well and I've been a developer I've played project manager roles as well so so in in today's topic like the topic says we're talking about prioritization techniques and and not just the basic ones like must have should have could have but but a wide range of topics so so but before we talk about what exactly we'll cover in today's topic a quick sort of poll to to get to know who all have done prioritization exercises of some kind have you been part who has participated in prioritization exercises okay cool about half whose which funds of you have led or organized sort of run these sessions run these sessions yourself have you a few people okay couple of you all right and how many of you have have been in a prioritization session XA ran an exercise and then felt this wasn't as effective did you feel the results weren't one quite what you expected stuff like that so you have you have some experience like that in the room so so we've been over the years working on on various project me and Tarang individually and and in some cases even while we were working on the same to team together we've we've come to realize that prioritization in agile teams is a very important activity it it happens whenever it does happen it has long-term impact you know when I say long-term the next two three months of what the team is doing will be determined by by those those sessions and the other thing is that that it needs to keep reoccurring every few iterations at some in at some level and every few months at least in most projects so so so that's why we've we've come to realize that there is a variety of of these types of techniques you know they vary in the scale at which you run them they vary in in what you getting your your stakeholders to think about and so in this session that's what we will try and cover a few of those try and get you to play a few games do a few exercises yourself to for you to experience some of that and with the hope that you'd be able to understand what are some of the techniques what are the common pitfalls how can you run it better and and most importantly when do you choose what techniques yeah is everyone able to see this the text on the slide clearly I think there's a contrast ratio problem with the project but are you able to read all the text on the slides can we get the lights a little bit dimmer is that possible guys over there can you get the lights dimmer okay so so to get get started we're actually going to start with something to get our hands dirty first and then we'll do a lot more talking after that so so with this one you'll probably need to be organized in groups of five to six so if there are about six people around the table or five people around the table you're good anyone sitting behind if you'd like to participate that you might actually find it more useful to gather around the table for this exercise so there are a couple of tables three tables in fact completely empty anything more than six in your group you'll probably struggle to do this so I would suggest if it's more than six you you break off into a separate group there are three tables up in the front which are empty I think this the the fear of front of the classroom right it never goes away at least for me it doesn't all right everyone in some groups yeah you can join this group I think six is okay for this exercise on every table that's fine you can you can do this in three as well this exercise you're fine if it's just three so in every table you in the front of the table there is a handout which looks like this it's got two slides on it you just need just this one page nothing else you don't need the dollars you don't need any of the other things just yet everyone have a handout like this for the group it's one for the group yeah anyone who doesn't have it on their table it should be in the front of the table guys can come come over join this table there are only three people on this side okay anyone else who doesn't have this all right so so let's let's imagine now that we are we're actually going to be so in your groups you've got to run a prioritization exercise tomorrow with your customer so all of your consultants right you've got a meeting with your customer stakeholders or the so-called business in the in your customers are stakeholders and this is some context to help you prepare for that exercise so one is that this one is a client they're called I furniture Inc right they sell high-end furniture online only they have no showrooms no physical showrooms they've just started a TV and ad campaign so they're spending a lot of money doing marketing you know getting their ads out there in front of people they've already amassed a reasonable amount of inventory of this high-end furniture that they are just waiting as soon as orders start to pour in from their website they will start shipping them off to customers they've also sort of it's a startup but they've heard that a couple of big industrial houses are also eyeing the market but they're not in the market yet but they think competition is going to get heated up pretty soon right everyone with me so far that's the context of your client right now that's the context of your project essentially where the project is at right now is that you've already got a basic shopping experience in place so users can already come to your website and they can buy look at different items of furniture put in their address and payment details and get it shipped to their homes okay there's also a whole bunch of new features required obviously that basic shopping experience is not good enough they've derived a whole bunch of ideas from some research that they've done but as it always is the case budget isn't enough for everything so their gut feel right now is that the budget will cover not even half of the critical things that they want to put in the site so that's where the need for prioritization has come in one thing they have told you is that this feature called smart recommendations and you'll see the feature list in a second is their CEO's pet feature alright and that's the list of features identified so far just a subset of it you I'll just leave us up on the screen as you run the exercise so in a group what you are doing is for tomorrow's meeting with this customer discuss among yourselves and identify a technique or a way in which you would get these features prioritized right there is some context that is available you know something about the customer you know something about where the project is so in a group any methods or any techniques that you've used in the past or seen others use how would you get these seven plus the 15 that aren't even listed here so the actual features don't matter so much just come up with the way in which you may want to get these prioritized effectively fair enough so far right so you're not looking to actually prioritize these items you're looking to create a plan for a prioritization session that you will run with your clients tomorrow yeah yeah so if you want you want to create a visual use the the paper around to create a visual you want to use the post-its for anything feel free to do that but take about three three to five minutes to come up with how are you going to get these items prioritized in your meeting with the customer tomorrow so talk as a group and identify that any questions on this exercise so far anyone just raise your hand yeah correct so once you've identified the method if you still have time as a group and you want to start prioritizing according to that method you feel free to start doing it but I suspect that most groups will run out of time to actually do that so just come up with the method is that's the main thing all right the time starts now let's start with three minutes and we'll we'll add it add a minute if you need to we'll we'll we'll revisit this exercise a little bit later as well so so let's let's just pause here for a little while so now let me check how many groups here thought of in the meeting tomorrow grouping these items in some way high medium low something like that okay so three okay so grouping based on user experience time to market those sort of criteria okay any any groups here that thought of getting these items ordered in a in a particular a force sequence with their customers okay you got think you're getting them ordered tomorrow okay all right any of you who are thinking that you'll use some sort of electronic tools tomorrow in your meeting to do this to make it effective any tools that you plan to use and that you discussed using no okay and any other techniques other than the ones I've talked about ordering things and grouping them or looking at some criteria anyone thought of anything completely different from this yeah ROI okay okay yeah okay so so couple of ideas touched on there one is based on ROI ask the customer to rank these items and the other is I want it I would like it that sort of that sort of thing okay okay that's another other way to do it which is to get a potential end user and target customer and get them to offer their inputs in that meeting okay great so that's a that's a nice mix of of techniques that we've come up with so let's let's actually get into that leads us to our first first group of techniques that you know we'll talk about so this is the most commonly used most often used we've we've called it classification based techniques basically you're you're getting your stakeholders to classify or group items into certain buckets right whether it is you know must have should have could have or priority one two three high medium low and so on right so those are those are common variants that that you would have seen stacked ranking you just ordering everything in in in a sequence is sort of a similar technique that you're trying to say okay now my group size is one just tell me exactly which order everything fits in we feel there are a bunch of pitfalls and let's talk about some of these has anyone tried to do this type of classification and heard this from their customers anybody yeah everything is high priority and and even after a few conversations if you get them to to think about it slightly differently one of the results that that I have seen often is 80 or 90% of the items that you're trying to group fall into the high and maybe there are a few items in low one one or two items in medium right so so this is one common pitfall that customers fall into and and us as consultants were trying to organize and and run the project phase or customers may even start with saying hey what's the need to do prioritization at all right I don't want everything anyway why do you need to know what's more important and what's less yeah any anybody heard this how can you call this low priority just the you know the stress being the word low I think that's that's again a psychological thing people sort of just you know the the the labels that you use for this exercise makes a makes a difference to how people will respond to it have you seen this you know there's one one feature that one stakeholder thinks is is very important than the other stakeholder disagrees and you know on something else they are they are on opposite sides again so how do you solve that so that's that's a common problem in in this sort of technique and so let's say you've you've done this and you've got some grouping but two months later when you when you look looking at it again you not quite sure and nobody at that point is quite sure as to why this was high or why this was medium has that ever happened with you guys raise your hands if it's if you've seen that happen so you've seen that you forget or and everybody forgets why some something is placed in a certain class and I guess the most important is you know so there are in this exercise we talked about 15 20 features in in on a real project you're looking at hundred stories or hundred features use cases whatever you call it and the amount of time it takes to do this could could run into days if if we end up talking a lot about each and every item right so that those are in our in our minds quite quite common pitfalls that that we face and we wanted to share some some tips some some things that we've learned over a course of running this and maybe some of you would have already experienced it but things like that I'm asked a question about what tools do you use it's useful to use use tools that help people collaborate so instead of one one person typing everything on on a computer it's better for everybody to work on a white board or use the keys and and have everybody collaborate so how many have had a big big Excel spreadsheet with stories or features up on a on a projector and asking people with is this high medium or low seen that seen that happen how effective is that with 150 items on that spreadsheet or even 50 not very right okay sorry weeks to do that right so you do do it more often is one of the ways if if what I was trying to indicate was if let's say you have 50 items that you need to prioritize maybe it's best to write them up on 50 cards and and put them on a table or put them on a board and and you know do do it together with everybody in the room using positive category labels so instead of must have should have could have won't have it's just semantics right but what if you instead use labels like now next and later right so later is low people would you know maybe make that connection but later doesn't sound as bad as low priority or you know just making it a timeline thing rather than this is lower value right now if someone's walked into your meeting saying all 23 are critical it's going to be a little bit hard to say oh wait no actually these are low priority and this one is important so agree on on what what will constitute a high you know how will you determine that something is a high or or something is a medium ties back to the thing about being able to remember reasons for why something is high so I think this group was talking about that group was talking about things like ROI or user experience so if you let's say come up with some definition to say you know high is stuff that directly brings in revenue for example and medium is stuff that that has a big impact on user engagement and experience and low is stuff is other stuff that doesn't give you these two but gives you something else for example so if you if you already agree with your customer all of your customer stakeholders and you have a clear understanding of that yourself and then get get people to still sort of put things under the under these buckets then you're likely to get better results impose as in objectives putting some objective criterion criteria you can write I mean even something saying a feature that brings us revenue is in some ways a is a yes no answer to it right yeah you can't and it's quantified maybe you could say you know the features that will give us a 10 person jump in revenue and that's an estimate that the client has to make that you know this this might give us so it's not signed it can't be more scientific than that but people who are running the business you would expect that they have a better judgment of what is likely to bring revenue what is likely to have other types of impact on the system right so I so the intent is I don't think should be to come up with a common definition in the sense that you could use this definition let's agree on one definition and you could use it project after project I don't think that is ever going to happen what's useful is given the current projects context what is most important for those stakeholders for that client and what definition can you together come up with based on the situation that you are on so I think that I think that itself would be an interesting exercise right if you find that you can't even come up with a common definition of what is a must-have then there's a lot more work to be done before assigning stories or features to those buckets right because then no matter what you someone the loudest person in the room may get their way first is a starting point but eventually as you're working to deliver the project you'll find that there are lots of people who don't agree right so that itself as an activity if that is difficult then it's best to spend the time on that rather than why is this card high why is this card must have wise this card say I should have and and and the in the real sort of important side effect for offer prioritization exercise is to get everybody in the room on the same page about why you know why things are important and and why some other things are less important and so on rather than the exact values of how important something is and so that's why those conversations are important now I it could be applicable in both contexts but we won't be able to spend more time on on some of this let's let's let's breeze through the next sections and we'll come back to it if we have time in at the end of the these remember other simplest techniques with many more techniques to still talk about right so imposing forced limits the idea is to is to sort of you know already at the beginning even before the customers put the first card in say in in the high priority category you can't have more than 50% of the total number of items that you're dealing with for example and and again it's a completely made up number you do you do that based on the context that you are in but but you impose some limits so that so that you get some you know better results than if there were no limits I'll I'll I think the other two other two tips are also interesting but we'll talk about about it when we have more time next we wanted to talk about a different type of classification prioritization techniques called value mapping techniques yeah so in this in the previous case if you recall you know many of the groups what we're thinking of using techniques which would ask the customer is this more important than this right or is are all of these must-haves and these should have so those are things that we are just asking people to compare two items or compare multiple items but I think a couple of groups did identify that maybe what are the things that are bringing value right is it what is it what are you after on the each each context there will be something specific that people are after so can we instead use those dimensions those things that people are after whether it's it's rapidly increasing their ROI or whether it's fastest time to market or it's keeping their cost to a minimum whatever those things that provide value are so one simple way to to use these is to to map is a simple two axes graph rate and and come up with some quadrants so something like this so this is the most common one we've seen this is not necessarily the canonical one that should always be used in fact you know it's a case-by-case basis what would go on those axes but the most common is revenue impact of that feature or that story map to what is the effort that it's going to take to implement have you seen this before this sort of revenue cause it's a basic cost-benefit trade off right so what this would look like is you take all your your items you put them up in over us stakeholders to collectively put them up where they belong in this space based on our effort and then revenue and then just draw some imaginary lines through it to create four quadrants and they should jump out at you right that there are the quadrants is a very clear priority order in the quadrants themselves so things that have maximum revenue impact for the least amount of effort that's in in quadrant one and then you would follow there so if you are now talking about 50 items and you started by just quickly assigning those 50 items into these and maybe narrowed to five or ten or twelve in that first quadrant then you only talk about those twelve right there's no point talking about any of the others before you've talked about those twelve clear enough so far yeah so now now let's think about the previous example right you still have the the client and and project context cards so so we won't we won't make you do do work in groups for this one just yet but can you think of from the context that you have seen and on the cards what might be a couple of dimensions of value that would be interesting to map these features against the eye furniture ink example just shout them out time to market okay budget okay budget in what sense the cost of the items you mean cost of each item okay what else user experience okay so sorry promotions was a can you add add something more to that okay so so we what we've done is you know just based on some of the context that's there this is some of the context you've already seen we've come up with a couple of suggested dimensions isn't have to be the only way to do it but because there is you know there's an ad campaign underway people are coming to the site right what features are going to help you convert visitors to the site what will make them spend their money if they've made it to the site already right some context again obviously it's a simplified simplified example reality is much more complex but these will be the kind of inputs you might use to pick the two most important dimensions the other one is time to market competitors circling the market eyeing the market so if they don't get in high value things into on the website first and get users bought in or users loyal they're going to lose those people to the competitors coming in right again depending on the context you would come up with any two dimensions that everyone agrees are the most crucial get your cards mapped and again it jumps out at you what what the relative importance of these different quadrants is right so so that's again a very simple quadrant type example but if you were to extend this even further so this is an example that a person called destrainer is blocked about this is interesting at one group talked about user experience so if you looked at if a couple of things that were most important to you were these features what is the maximum number of users that is going that are going to use this feature versus how frequently will they use it so five percent of my users are going to use it but actually they're going to use it five times a day right so you know where where to put that put that card on the bottom axis is how many people are going to use it and on the on the top axis is how many times a day or how frequently are they going to use those now from this also to jump out at you which ones are the most crucial right again if it was determined that for that context these two dimensions were the most important or from a consensus building standpoint these were the most valuable to talk about so this is just an extension of that basic quadrant's idea now one could take this even further right what if what if they want only two dimensions right how do you represent a three or four dimension thing in something like that right there are actually four very very critical aspects on the basis of which you want to get this prioritized so there are some more complex techniques that unfortunately we won't have time to get into but one of them is called systemical this is something that our colleague from ThoughtWorks Barrio Riley has blogged about so you should be able to find it so this is essentially taking many different aspects of that of value rather than just two and allowing you to map them we're going to talk more about this in the open space after this session for anyone who's interested because unfortunately this would take 20 minutes to talk about here and there's another one called R which is another set of things that you can use to map value and the pirate comes from the acronym obviously so again this is another one we can talk about in the open space if folks are interested so these were different techniques for for mapping value of the items that you're trying to prioritize the thing I'd like to add about value be a value mapping based techniques is that they they automatically result in in getting you the answer of why something is in some group right the the nature of the exercise itself gets gets you that answer naturally which is which is very important as as a result so next let's let's see the other way to do prioritization is is you know a set of techniques called marketplace simulation and and we we have we're going to play an interesting game for that a game called buy a feature so let's let's play that game and then I'll talk about what really was going on when you played it so for this game what we need is exactly five people on each table so quickly reorganize yourself such that you have exactly five people on a table exactly five you won't be able to do this with this table needs two people if if couple of you don't mind moving here two more people there so do you want to join do you want to join that group and one more from this group can join that table there okay is it five per table yeah every table do you have some dollar notes that look like this just divide up the dollar notes equally among yourselves each one should get 86 any any table doesn't have the dollar notes so so every if everybody picks up every one diamond one denomination right so pick up 50 20 10 5 and 1 note each each of you so so each person on the table should have 86 dollars of their own money in fake dollars so in all your your group of five has 430 dollars that you are going to spend on on something I'll talk about what that something is so this simulation is that you are a family of of five and you've recently bought a car right and and now you you want to buy some accessories for your car but all the accessories that the car offers adds up to the cost for that adds up to 1200 dollars but but as a group you have only decided to spend 430 dollars right so so that's what you need to do every each of you has 86 dollars you need to work with work with everybody else in your team and and get to a consensus about using the money that you have which accessories will you buy you will see a handout that Tarang just passed which has that looks like this yeah so this is this has nine boxes every box is one accessory that you need to buy so you'll see accessories like alloy wheels and power steering and and stereo system so you as a group decide and and a way to spend this money and and the way to do it would be once you have decided something put the money on on the table right so put the money near that's near that item on on that piece of paper and so take the next five minutes to do this everyone clear so far on what you're doing you've got money you can't buy everything you've got to collectively as a group decide what you want to buy questions anyone okay so let's let's do this yeah about five minutes to do this about why does this exercise feel good why does it give good results any actually any group that felt it gave horrible results because you couldn't agree at all that group okay okay excellent so so what what did you discover about that everyone had very different priorities can you say that again sorry okay okay fine alright so let's let's talk about this game it's a game from from innovations that that was created by innovation games there are there are many more such games around software development that they have in there by a feature why it works well in in certain situations it works beautifully and and it's because instead of just asking people hey tell me what is important and and and what is more important than than something else etc when you actually give them very hard constraints that you have this much money this this this thing costs this much how what do you really want to buy and and just that act of forcing somebody to think as if they were spending real money real resources on it and putting realistic constraints on on that causes a very different type of thinking it it really causes people to automatically balance cost versus value in whatever they are they are looking to prioritize so so that so that I think that's that's one and I also noticed a lot of groups having animated conversations about hey you know what will you do with music if you're not safe and and and stuff like that right so those those conversations as consultants as somebody who's trying to understand the context at a client just overhearing or being in the room when those conversations happen can be very valuable because in that way you get to know who cares about what aspect of the system who you know who is your champion for for for for cross-functional requirements in in this team who's your champion for you know X type of user group within within your your user base etc so so that is very valuable and and I guess the most important thing is you know you you guys didn't have enough time to really finish this but but if you if you if you let people take 30 minutes or an hour to really talk through things then at the end of it people sort of feel much more satisfied that they are on the same page because they've talked about it they are they are forced to negotiate with each other to say you know this thing is important I only have 30 dollars will you will you also spend your 25 dollars on this and so on right and can you get three people four people in the room to to agree on some things importance and buy it that's important well it's it's difficult to say but but but in some sense it it mimics real life right so in real life as well you know there'll be points like this which you know where where they'll be forced to either choose this or that and there'll be a time deadline to choose and I don't know you know when you make that decision do you do that just because the clock is ticking or whether but but people choose to agree and and say yes you know this is what we'll need to do given the options we have in front of us right so that's it that's interesting I'll just make one comment about that the the while that that works well and you get sort of you know if the if the responders really take the time to to write down what they feel well then it gives you context about what they are thinking the downside of that may be that then you own you end up being responsible for that final coalition and and playing it back and if I'm one of the stakeholders who says I don't care you know what your summary is but I think this then it's very difficult to still change people's minds versus exercises where you actually get everybody together in the same room talking about this then they can sort of fight it out amongst themselves right and and and we can help facilitate it as as the software development team so this game is sorry yeah yeah so this game is also interesting because it scales up really well so we use this last year there were about 45 different items as an as an office ThoughtWorks Pune office that we wanted to focus on for the following year across a broad range of topics of which obviously we would not have been able to focus on more than four or five as an office in a big way so how do we prioritize so we had about hundred people playing this game in parallel for those 45 items and then we bubbled up using the results across all hundred hundred people and got to priority list so it scales up well so again the same idea of instead of emailing out a questionnaire you could play this online with the people there is an online version of this game so you could play this with people sitting anywhere so we had some folks who are from our office who are sitting in other locations who are also playing and participating and we got results from this game so and we've tried it on real projects as well and it actually we found it to work work really effectively yeah that's what you will derive out of it but the the intent is to get people to think as if they have limited amount of money and they need to make a buying decision we are very used to doing that as human beings right so we have quite good at doing that we automatically then psychologically will think about all the right things before and not go with emotions like oh you know CEO really likes this you know I don't care for you know if I have my money to spend I'll probably spend it on this type of thing happens so just read more about this because the pricing how do you do pricing for these things all of this is very interesting it doesn't have to tie to real-life prices and all of that to get the end result so there's a lot of material on how do you structure these games without even having all the information that's that's relevant alright so next we're going to talk about the fourth sort of category of prioritization techniques and and to us these are probably the most most interesting the most exciting because they are not really prioritization techniques per se I'll let Tarang talk more about about both of these so we've just termed this as context evaluation techniques but it's really it changing the question it's not asking the question of is this more important or how does this relate to this or why is this more important it's saying before we can even prioritize anything can we understand the full context in which that item exists and once we all collectively look at the context maybe the priorities will jump out so the act of actually doing priorities becomes less important it's that shared context where does everything fit together which then makes the prioritization discussion or the actual final marking of a priority really simple so let me give you an example some of you would have heard of the idea of story maps anyone here for the management agility conference and attended Jeff Patton session on this okay so you would have gone into a lot of detail we probably can't get into a lot of detail but this is one technique we've used very very effectively for prioritization so very quickly I'll just talk about what it is and we can talk more about this in the open space if anyone's interested so what you're doing here is that I don't know whether it's visible but there are blue boxes right at the top oops sorry about that the blue boxes at the top are things that are real life activities for users what are users doing in real life so they are planning a vacation they are checking in for their flights they are checking up baggage restrictions those are all real life activities that users are doing typically organized by a timeline so first a user would buy a ticket then they would check in for a flight then they would you know post flight see whether the points have been credited or not so from a timeline perspective you're trying to look at what activities are there then below that again the the colors may not be that visible but the pink cards here are indicating what are the the tasks on your system on your application that the user would do to achieve those activities those real life things if the first activity was planned my vacation what are the five things or two things that they can do on your application to plan their vacation and below that you would just list sub tasks what are the things under and under the search for flight under all of that you look at what are all the sub tasks that make that up so this is part of you could have literally hundreds of items here right all you're doing is you're saying let's understand how all hundred items relate to each other is there a pattern so one is there a time sequence that users will use them in from on the left to right organization and also on the top to bottom can we just rank these as for this task this story is actually less optional and this is more optional right so this story if it didn't do we can't even achieve this while this story you know what it's fine it can come a little bit later so top to bottom is indicates optionality and left to right is just saying sequence in which users are likely to do these activities on your application so now once you've listed things like this if you say like you see in the second diagram it's actually pretty easy for stakeholders to just stand there and then just start drawing lines around a set of cards saying oh yeah these set of cards together actually is good enough as my first priority or as my first release and Jeff Patton talks about this a lot more on his on his blog so please do look that up if you haven't attended his session in this in this conference already and again we'll talk more about in the open space we can actually show you some examples from real projects where we've used this for for prioritizing in excess of a hundred different story cards all at all at the same time a very similar not very similar but another item in this category of understanding context is another innovation game called prune the product tree how many have heard of this game okay so some of you have heard of them so here also the idea is instead of treating everything as a leaf right and trying to say my hundred or 150 leaf items and let me try and prioritize it you visually lay it out in a way that organizes all of those cards and then you look at it and then figure how do you actually remove things if it's too many if your tree is too thick right no not enough sunlight is going to get to the items at the bottom how do you start removing those sources understanding all your requirements in context and then the actual act of removing things from there becomes pretty easy so again encourage you to read more about it there's in the book and on the website about how this technique can be used to build consensus and and get to priorities for large number of things again this is something we're happy to talk about in the open space we probably won't have time to to talk more about this in this session all right all right so let's let's summarize what what we've covered so far right so we we talked about four types of prioritization techniques the most basics basic ones being classification based right so must have should have could have priority one two three we talk we talked about that we we we talked about how to improve improve on the results there we talked about value mapping based techniques which was which was the priority coordinates and the variations within that system eco model and our mapping is is other two techniques which are similar and and they map value we did we played by a feature using using currencies there are there are variations of this as well that that you can do but the the core idea being that you force people to spend the limited number of resources on the things that they want to that they think are important and use poker chips we've used playing cards also as as ways for you know to represent currency and and of course right at the end we've talked about context evaluation based techniques and and story mapping is is one way to do it product pruning the product tree is another way to do it so like like Tarang's been saying we've we would have loved for this this this workshop to be longer maybe maybe two or three hours that way we could have actually experienced all of these various kinds of techniques and and got more insight but but because we are short of time we we can't cover all that but we are more than happy to talk about all or any of this material just after this session we hang out in the open space just near the ThoughtWorks booth so if anybody is interested wants to see some of this in action then we can show you some some other pictures and share experience all right any questions comments yeah we have about seven to eight minutes for questions so we're happy to sorry sorry yeah I think the question was what what kind of projects would you apply some of these two okay so yeah actually that's an interest that was one one part of this presentation that we we didn't get time to talk about which is how would you choose a technique right in what case would you use just a simple must have should have could in what case should you use a story map which is the other end of the complexity stream so the in our experience we found there are a few different attributes that we would look at and Chirag jump in so there are things like how many items do you need to prioritize how many stakeholders really have a lot of key input into that in general as a starting point is there a lot of consensus among that group or do you know that they are very much at odds with each other is the context well understood are all of those items would you easily be able to go to any of the stakeholders and pretty much understand the same context which users will use this feature when will they use it all of those so you have to do some homework right before you before you decide then what is the context what are you trying to get at what is your end goal that you're trying to prioritize these for is it just to inform what should the development team pick up in the next two months is it to actually help your customer publish a product roadmap again it depends on on all of those things and you'll take all of those into consideration and say this is what we would choose I think the the severity of the constraints that you are you're looking at could also determine which type of techniques you use right so if you feel like you know what there is no way I can even do 10% of what what the system what the clients wishlist is then you probably need to use a technique which which really forces them to make make very strong choice make very difficult choices right in the beginning and so on so just we've we've almost completely at least the chirag and me we've completely stopped using those initial first classification based techniques we typically find that they're not not very effective and the common pitfalls are can be overcome but it still doesn't give that rich information that you know two months later also we can go back and say okay this is why we prioritized these things in this way so our preference is very strongly towards some of the more sophisticated techniques which of course means they take more time more homework more effort all of that other questions alright so any of you interested in in any of the the open space items do catch us outside that 430 after the break for after this session thank you feel free to send us any comments or thoughts after you know straight straight to our email addresses if if you have something to share could you could leave it we'll we'll collect it after the session yeah so the the fake dollar notes in particular if you could leave at the table we can use them again