Product Management / Requirements / Software development

Goldilocks and the Three Products

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Michael on High-Tech Product Management and Marketing has a fantastic “wish I wrote that” post about the importance of having the right number of features. He has several references, the best of which is Kathy Sierra’s Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak post from June 2005. The two posts combined provide great insight into why having too many features is bad, while acknowledging that too few is just as bad. In this post we will look at what we can do to apply these insights and also change the rules some, making our software more desireable than our competition.

Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements

Epicenter software design – 37signals applies Kano

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Jason at 37signals has started a discussion about feature prioritization with his recent post. He describes the epicenter of software as the most important, must-have feature. He argues that this feature should always be the one that is built first, since without it you don’t have an application. This is the same approach we reccommended in our recent post about prioritizing requirements with Kano analysis. The epicenter, while critically important, isn’t sufficient to drive success for the software.

Requirements / Slightly off-topic

Magic square of innovation

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Marcus Ting-A-Kee has a post on his blog with a great magic square diagram describing a perspective on innovation. This framework provides us with an easy way to assess the potential impact of an innovation. We will…

* show how to use the square
* look at some example innovations
* and use the square to prioritize requirements

Interaction design / Prioritization / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX

How To Create Personas for Goal Driven Development

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We mentioned the creation of personas in our overview of the interaction design process. In this post we will talk in more detail about how to create them. We will cover identification and prioritization of the personas, defining the corporate and personal goals for the personas, and creating the anecdotal stories that give each persona an identity against which we can make design decisions. Scenarios are also defined for the primary personas, which drive the creation of the functional requirements specification.

Marketing / Requirements / Software development

We must sell the software first

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We write a lot about value-driven prioritization of software requirements. It’s easy (when defining requirements) to forget that we have to sell the product before anyone gets any value from it. With internal use software for large companies (like enterprise software, intranets, erp systems), “sell it” means “get high user adoption rates.” High user rates are key to getting ROI when process-improvement is one of the targets of the software.

Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development

Prioritizing software requirements across releases

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When prioritizing requirements for the first release of our software, we’ve stressed the importance of including 100% of the ‘must have’ requirements in the first release of the software. We’ve also used Kano analysis to categorize requirements as ‘must be’, ‘surprise and delight’, and ‘more is better’ requirements. In this post we’ll talk about an approach to allocating these requirements across releases.