Estimating the amount of work required to deliver software is hard. Estimating the amount of work in the very early stages of a project is even harder. A method was developed to estimate the amount of work required by analyzing what the system will allow its users to do. That method is called Estimating With Use Case Points. This article is an introduction to the concept.
Marketing / Polls / Product Management
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Product Manager Role Details and Survey Results
Pragmatic Marketing runs an annual survey of product managers. We looked at 440 results from the 2006 Product Manager Survey to uncover the trends in how different product manager roles are defined. The survey involved questions breaking down the allocation of time to different activities. In this article we look at how those activities varied for product managers, product marketing managers, segment / market managers, and technical product managers.
Business Analysis / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / ROI
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Prioritization With ROI and Utility
Prioritization with ROI is generally thought of as a quantitative analysis. For hard ROI, that is true. For soft ROI, it is anything but true. You have to make a prediction of the utility of the requirement or feature. That predicted utility is based on our expected utility, which is based on your past experiences. Your past experiences are reflected in remembered utility, which is a function of experienced utility. How can you know with certainty, and use that to prioritize requirements or features?
Prioritization / Product Management
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Differentiate Your Product – Circumvent Comparisons
Look Ma! Me Too! The temptation to compete against a checklist can be overwhelming. When we have a competitor who provides 100 of this or 200 of that, it might seem smart to offer 200 of this and 300 of that. We’ll be better off if we focus instead on creating the other thing. The best way to compete is to valuably differentiate our product, not outdo our competition.
More is better features are just that – more is better. But more of the same old thing is worth a whole lot less than some of something else.
Foundation series / Product Management
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Foundation Series: Inbound and Outbound Product Management
Inbound product manager or outbound product manager – what’s the difference? We’ll look at the overall role, and the breakdown of responsibilities. We also follow-up with some suggested detailed reading.
Product Management
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Product Manager Staffing Levels – More Survey Results
One of our readers is working on determining product manager staffing levels for her company. While every company is different, it always helps to understand where our peers are. We do some in-depth analysis of the 2006 Pragmatic Marketing product management and marketing survey to see how other companies set their staffing levels.
Design / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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The Wisdom of Crowds Prevents People’s Passions
The wisdom of crowds helps us avoid stupid decisions. Unfortunately, it also prevents innovative, passionate, fantastic decisions. Collective Intelligence is collective insipidness. We need to keep the inputs of individuals in the mix.
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Writing
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Writing Stylish Requirements
You knew it would happen eventually, the big ten rules of writing requirements has become the big twelve rules. Maybe scope creep isn’t such a bad thing after all. Writing style plays an important role in writing requirements too.
Product Management / Requirements / Software development
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To Buy, or Not To Buy. To Build? is the Question
Should we buy this application, or build it in house? How should we make that decision today?