If you’re using Agile and Scrum, your product owner probably owns your product backlog – defining and prioritizing product features as user stories.

Example – As a user, I want to know how many apples are in the basket, so that I know how many apples I can eat.

What if defining and prioritizing user stories became a collaborative, end-user process? Your product’s end users would define and prioritize their own user stories as a community. The product owner would continue to provide oversight, but the product backlog would become self-managing.

Click here for an example of what this might look like.

UserVoice.com provides a free tool to support this model.

Only the hottest items (i.e. the most votes and comments) would make it to the Sprint Backlog to be worked on by the development team.