
Engagement – that’s what this whole product management blogging thing is about. Check out what Tyner Blain readers found to be the most engaging articles in 2009.

Engagement – that’s what this whole product management blogging thing is about. Check out what Tyner Blain readers found to be the most engaging articles in 2009.

Unless you live in a world filled with unicorns and rainbows, writing realistic requirements is critical. When you set unattainable goals, the best result you can hope for is a frustrated engineering team. Write requirements that are attainable, and your team will surprise you with what they can achieve.

Design-Free requirements are important for two reasons, and hard for two other reasons.
Design-free requirements are hard because you “know what you want” when you should be documenting “why you want it.” Writing design-free requirements can be hard when you don’t trust your development team to “do the right thing” even though it is not your job to design the solution.

Kano Analysis, while initially created to understand customer satisfaction with features, can be used by product managers to better understand customer problems. I gave a presentation last week for the Product Management View webinar series on Kano Analysis for product managers.

Concise requirements give your team a useful, easy to read and easy to change understanding of what must be done. Great requirements exist to do three things:

Writing valuable requirements is important. It doesn’t matter how well your teams execute if they are off building the wrong products / capabilities / features. The right products and capabilities are the ones that have relevant value.

User stories can make requirements management a lot easier. They shift some of the communication from up-front documentation to ongoing dialog. That’s the main reason they work so well for agile teams. And agile teams focus on “what’s next?” instead of an ever-changing “what’s everything?” The problem is, when those conversations are working well, it is easy to forget to make sure that what you’ve done is actually enough. Add a small dose of traceability, and you can easily validate the completeness of your user stories.

When defining requirements, you always start in the context of a goal – either a user goal or a corporate goal. You need to be aware of both. Having a positive user experience is important, and requires a user-centered understanding. Achieving your corporate goals might be in conflict with some user goals.

Blue Ocean Strategy provides an interesting reactive analysis of companies and markets. Personas are used to understand your customer’s needs. Combining the two provides powerful proactive insights when positioning your product for market success.

A lot of books and blogs and experts tell us to use “The System shall…” when writing requirements. Read on to find out why that’s not a very good idea.