We read a lot about the value of listening to your customers and understanding your markets. We don’t hear as much about what happens when you ignore your customers. Thanks to documents exposed as part of a class action lawsuit, we get to see just how bad it can be. […]
Is Your Product Improving?
Do you recognize this early logo from Amazon.com? Future Now has a great article detailing how Amazon evolved their “add to shopping cart” implementation. From reviewing this summary of the evolution of one feature, we can see that Amazon decided there was value in reinvention. The improved the way their […]
Ask A Good Product Manager
Ask A Good Product Manager is a new blog just launched by Jeff Lash, who also authors How To Be A Good Product Manager, one of our favorite blogs.
Cockburn Affirms: Use Cases Rule for Agile!
We’ve been promoting use cases as the right way to approach agile requirements, and in a recent article, Alistair Cockburn stresses the importance of use cases. Over the last three years, he has found that teams that avoid use cases consistently run into the same three problems. We defer, of […]
Specializing Generalists and the Politics of Agile
A successful agile team requires someone on the team to act as the voice of the customer, someone to lead the developers, someone to lead quality assurance, and someone to organize, coordinate, and assure execution. For an agile team to succeed in an enterprise ripe with political resistance to agile, […]
The NICE Way To Think About Requirements
Too much information about requirements or too little? Too much documentation or too little? Use the NICE framework to get it just right.
SRS Plan of Attack
How do you approach starting a small requirements project as part of a large initiative within a massive enterprise? Do you boil the ocean? Your customer knows she needs “requirements” to give to her development team. She asks you – what will you deliver, and how long will it take? […]
Use Case Management is a Tough Balancing Act
Learning how to write use cases can be tough, but it is simple compared to the balancing act of determining which use cases to write and how to manage the expectations of all the stakeholders that are involved. It can be a difficult balancing act to prioritize use cases to […]
Requirements: Knowledge and Understanding
[photo by Henkster] Writing good requirements is more than just about following a set of rules. You can capture knowledge about your goals and your product with a set of well crafted requirements. But to truly write good requirements, you have to gain a level of understanding that surpasses knowledge. […]