I think this is also an British acronym for Wives and Girlfriends - that could get you in trouble. Don't do that.
I'm talking about the "Wild Ass Guess".
Trying to prioritize a product backlog is like Window shopping. You can prioritize all the things you want at the top of your list, but unless you have some sort of idea of cost, it's not really effective.
In a waterfall project, you'd have a design phase where you worked out how to accomplish the requests, then do detailed work breakdowns to identify how many hours/days/weeks are involved to complete the work.
That's a lot of effort and time to invest in something that you may not even want to build.
In most cases the WAG is good enough to allow the Business and Product Owner to prioritize.
I've taken a liking to T-Shirt sizes:
- Small,
- Medium,
- Large
- X-Large etc.
It allows the Product Owner to compare the features, but doesn't get you bogged down in the "How many hours?" discussion - which isn't really useful.
