Market concentration – or fragmentation – is an important big picture view of your market. Insights into the nature of competition for your customers will help you make decisions about your product. But only if you correctly define your market.
Category Archives: Product Management
Use Cases for Iterative Development
Almost everything I’ve read about use cases focuses on describing what needs to be added to your product. Agile development says “get it working first, make it better second.” That means changing the way the software enables a user to do something they can already do. How do you manage requirements for incremental improvement?
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Posted in Agile, Business Analysis, Interaction design, Prioritization, Product Management, ROI, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, UX, Usability, Use Cases
Tagged agile development, agile use cases, incremental development, iterative development, satisficing, use cases
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Bad Product or Bad Positioning? Intel’s Unlockable CPU
Intel introduced the G6951 unlockable CPU consumer product this month. Most of the press has been critical. Is this new chip / upgrade process a bad product, or a good product with bad positioning?
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Posted in Product Management, Quick Post, Slightly off-topic
Tagged intel, intel g6951 benefits, positioning, Product Management
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Passionate Requirements
Writing passionate requirements is not about writing with passion. It is about writing the requirements that cause people to be passionate about your product. Find the most important problem, for your most important customers. Understand the essence of what is important to solve that problem, for only those people. Then write passionate requirements.
Customer-Centric Market Model
A market can be thought of as the collection of contexts in which you might sell your product. You can split your market into a set of market segments. Each of those segments represents a group of customers, each of whom shares a set of problems for which they would pay for solutions.
Atomic Requirements
Each requirement you write represents a single market need, that you either satisfy or fail to satisfy. A well written requirement is independently deliverable and represents an incremental increase in the value of your software. That is the definition of an atomic requirement. Read on to see why atomic requirements are important.
Sprint Backlog – Don’t Solve Half of the Problem
Every team that transitions to agile faces this problem – some stories are too big to fit in a single sprint. Most of the teams that I have worked with have the wrong instinct – to solve half of the problem for all users.
The right approach is to first solve all of the problem for a subset of the users.
Verifiable Requirements
Writing Verifiable Requirements should be a rule that does not need to be written. Everyone reading this has seen or created requirements that can not be verified. The primary reason for writing requirements is to communicate to the team what they need to accomplish. If you can’t verify that what the team delivered is acceptable, neither can the team. This may be the most obvious of the rules of writing requirements – but it is ignored every day.
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Writing Unambiguous Requirements
Writing unambiguous requirements is about understanding what is written, and what is read. Without a clear understanding of your market, you can’t write unambiguously. Even when you understand your market, you risk writing something that is ambiguous to your readers. Documenting requirements is about communication. Don’t break this rule, or you’ve wasted all the energy you spent understanding your requirements.
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Innovation and Transparency
Accept has invited me to participate in their webinar series on Transparency and Innovation – this Wednesday, July 28, 2010 (10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern).
Join us and join in!
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Posted in Product Management
Tagged innovation, innovation and transparency, market insight, product managers, transparency
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