As a product owner, you work closely with your product team and customers, making you the important person responsible for the AWS product roadmap. No one else is expected to understand customer needs and market trends better than you. You are driven not only to identify proactively and reactively any future service improvements and new features, but also to develop entirely new products and services that target new unmet needs in the market. That is the level of foresight you need to have.

You are expected to lead the product strategy within your business and make sure the strategy and roadmap is aligned with your organization’s vision and goals.

As product owner you are the bridge between the organization & delivery, ensuring solutions deliver value. To do this, as best practice you run annual product strategy sessions involving the main functional leaders who engage directly or indirectly with your customers. At this stage, you develop the vision for your product strategy for the upcoming year and build a list of product backlog.

It is after this step that many product owners encounter a challenge.

Sure, you know what features have to be added, but do you know how to prioritize what to work on in the coming year? Ideally you would love to not only develop and implement all the ideas you got for new features & improvements but also build new products from scratch. But, realistically speaking, in this fast-paced age of cloud pioneered by AWS, there is a limit on resources and time that are available to you. So, you must prioritize in the right manner.

Effective prioritization means you need to have the right parameters in mind. An expert product owner is going to be the one who can identify the right parameters early on and effortlessly incorporate these into the process.

Before it becomes second nature, we have an aid to help you prioritize – in line with Design Thinking philosophy and our experience consulting for AWS partners, we recommend that product owners start with the following 3 foundational parameters:

1. Feasibility with your AWS product capability

Feasibility means the capability you have both internally and externally to build and deliver the idea successfully.

• Key Partners- 3^rd party vendors or partners involved to create and deliver
• Key Activities- Tasks expected to be done regularly to deliver
• Key Resources- Internal talent and tooling

2. Desirability for your AWS product

Desirability is the external desire for such a feature or product among your customers. This parameter also covers the internal desire and drivers within your organization for the product.

• Customer relationships- Channels to be used for service delivery, sales engagement and marketing
• Customer segments- Taking existing customers’ needs or new markets’ desire into consideration
• Company Vision- Alignment with the company’s vision and goals

3. Viability aligned against your product strategy

Viability means the potential of generating profits when the product or feature is implemented successfully.

• Revenue Streams- Simplistic Total Addressable Market value or similar “back of napkin” estimate of potential revenue
• Cost Structure- High level costing to build the idea out

Assess your ideas against these 3 foundational parameters to score and prioritize your features, enhancements and product development ideas. Pursue and incorporate the high-priority ideas into your annual product strategy. Of course, at VeUP we recommend considering other parameters that reflect what is important to your business, but as a starting point these 3 foundational parameters are good to go.