Get to know your customers' priorities for your Scrum project using Google Apps

The product owner in Scrum ensures the ROI of the software. Getting the right priorities on what features to include in the next release is an important element in optimizing that ROI. Often the product owner will seek the help of customers & prospects in getting the priorities right. Google Apps offers some great "out of the box" tools to reach out to your customers. In this blog entry we will set up a simple system to get their priorities on features. If you're familiar with Google Docs and Sites it will take you 5 minutes. If not this is an opportunity to explore these tools.


Step 1: publish the list of potential features for your next release on a Google Site (see Google Help Creating a Site). For each feature, we add an image, a user story and some reference documentation. A Google site is like a Wiki so therefor you can add whatever information you want to explain your features to your customers.

Step 2: create a Google Form. With Google Docs, you can quickly create a form or survey, email it to your friends, family, or colleagues, and keep track of the answers in one spreadsheet (see Google Docs Help Creating a form). We create a simple form with just one question. The question is a grid in which the rows contain the features and the columns their desired priority. Click the image to have a closer look at the form.


We also added the link to the Google Site in the header section of the form. Customers can review the descriptions before voting on their priorities.

You can add an email notification that alerts you whenever someone votes.

Send the url of the live form to your customers and prospects and await their votes.

Step 3: reviewing the results of the voting is easy. Google integrated some greating looking graphics to review the responses. At a glance you can see what features your customers really want.

You can pick up the template for this form in the Google Docs template gallery.