Archive of Requirements Models Articles

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.

Read the rest of the article…

People who already use Scrum will only find one new thing in this article – a way to communicate what happens inside a sprint that has proven effective for me.  People who are new to Scrum who wonder “how do things work inside a sprint?” will see how things work in a way that avoids hyperbole and is easy to map to what they already understand from traditional software development processes.

Read the rest of the article…

“For what one idea do you want your product to stand in the mind of your customer?”  I heard Roger Cauvin ask that question at the most recent ProductCamp Austin [correction - he said it here - thanks Roger], and the quote has been jumping to the front of my mind almost daily ever since.  Maybe by writing about it I can exorcise the demon and get back to using the idea instead of being haunted by it.

April Dunford just presented Startup Marketing 101 at DemoCamp Toronto.  Great ideas from the ‘marketing and your startup’ point of view.  I’ve often said that product managers and product marketers care about much of the same market data, they just do different things with it.  The idea of minimal feature set came up in April’s presentation – this article talks about product management, agile, and initial market acceptance.

I came across a really interesting article LukeW.com, showing how making changes to the way an input form on a website increased interaction by 25 to 40%. The changes reflect the value of thinking outside-in, investing in user experience, and performance measurement.

Bonus: the idea is cool.

You give your requirements to the engineering team, and they look complete.  The team builds your product, you launch it and the market soundly rejects it.  Why?  Because your requirements weren’t complete – they didn’t actually solve the problem that needed to be solved.

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.

Read the rest of the article…

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.

Read the rest of the article…

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.

Read the rest of the article…

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.

Read the rest of the article…