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Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering

Avoid the Abilene Paradox

Posted on: November 8, 2007

An excellent article by Jonathan Babcock raises a thought provoking idea. When gathering requirements, we can end up with requirements that no one actually wants, because everyone thought someone else wanted it. This is apparently known as the Abilene Paradox, a term coined by Jerry Harvey. We can apply our […]

Flashback

Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-10-13]

Posted on: October 13, 2007October 10, 2007

A look back at the best from a year ago.

Communication / Design / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / ROI / Software development / Usability / Writing

Goal Driven Upgrades

Posted on: October 11, 2006January 23, 2007

Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular – using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.

Communication / Design / Interaction design / Requirements Models / Use Cases / UX / Writing

Use Case Driven Documentation

Posted on: October 10, 2006February 19, 2007

Yesterday we wrote about focusing our documentation on what our users are trying to accomplish. With a structured requirements approach, or with an interaction-design driven approach, we’ve already solved half the problem – determining what to document.

Communication / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software requirements specification / Writing

Requirements Document Proliferation

Posted on: January 20, 2006May 11, 2006

Too many companies don’t document their requirements.

Worse still, too many companies over-document their requirements.

Communication / Consulting / Requirements / Requirements management software

Managing requirements conversations

Posted on: December 27, 2005

In Documents vs. Conversations, on the Pyre blog, Greg Wilson does that thing that we so rarely do – he takes a step back, and thinks from an entirely different perspective about managing requirements. He proposes the idea of managing requirements as conversations, instead of as documents. Greg makes the […]

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These articles are written primarily for product managers. Everyone trying to create great products can find something of use here. Hopefully these articles help you with thinking, doing, and learning.

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