Is anyone tracking "sold commitments" to customers at the feature level and using this to prioritize their backlog?

I did this with an early stage product spin-off a few years ago. It’s sort of a “sell it first, build it later” scenario.

To track progress against the commitment I had a few things in place.

1. Capture every insight that relates to what the ultimate capability will be, not just the committed customer’s insight. That’s where the priority weight comes from.
2. Set an objective that addresses the strategic opportunity (which should have been there before you sold it … but you know how that goes). This helps drive your weighting also.
3. Connect all your insights to the feature(s) or component that describes the new capability and map that to the objective.
4. Add milestones for the committed dates and describe how they connect to the ultimate objective.

With that simple structure in place, I had a good way to stay on top of where we were and a base to iterate my strategy on. I also had a program manager on the job who helped with accountability on all the cross-departmental dependencies -- you really don’t want to miss anything on customer commitments like that!

In the case I described, the program manager was a general resource across the org. She was assigned primarily to my major feature and new product launches and helped with all the operational coordination and keeping everyone honest. In that role, I was creating the products ops processes in anticipation of a ProdOps hire that came along a year or so later.