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” […]
Foundation Series: Cross-Selling and Upselling
You have an eCommerce site. You sell products online. Do you cross-sell additional products? Do you upsell to better products? This article explains the difference between cross-sell and upsell, and looks at some real-world data about the effectiveness of both.
Modeling User Competency
Perpetually intermediate (competent) users. Users who briefly exist as novice users and never become experts. Most of your users are competent, and you should design for them. Competent users have different needs and different expectations than novice or expert users. How do you know your user’s competency levels, so you […]
Concise Requirements
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: Identify the problems that need to be solved. Explain why those problems are worth solving. Define when those problems are solved.
Writing Complete User Stories
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 […]
User Goals and Corporate Goals
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 […]
ProductCamps and Class Diagrams
For you product managers out there – here are a couple upcoming productcamp unconferences. For you business analysts, here’s an excuse to do a little domain modeling and practice your UML class diagram skills.
Foundation Series: Price Elasticity
When prices go up, demand goes down. But how much does it go down? Price elasticity of demand is the term economists use for the math that describes this behavior.
Pictures and Ideas for Powerful Whitepapers
Pictures can convey messages much more powerfully than words. In a recent discussion about writing whitepapers, I suggested combining the idea-creation advice from Made To Stick with the image-creation advice from Back of The Napkin. Check out this article to see some concrete examples.