Don’t Prioritize Features!

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Estimating the “value” of features is a waste of time. I was in a JAD session once where people argued about if the annoying beeping (audible on the conference line) was a smoke alarm or a fire alarm. Yes, you can get to an answer, but so what?! The important […]

Customer-Centric Market Model

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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 […]

Verifiable Requirements

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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 One Idea of Your Product

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“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 […]

Minimum Market Acceptance

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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 […]

Complete Requirements

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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.

Kano Analysis for Product Managers

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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.