Value-Based Requirements

The technology world is littered with high profile products that demonstrated great development feats but did not produce the market successes originally hyped. The problem many of these products faced was delivering enough benefits to customers to overcome the “costs” incurred. In other words, the products did not deliver enough VALUE.

The steps to determine if enough value can be delivered to the market need to happen as early as possible in the product development lifecycle to reduce the risk of market failure. It starts with identification of a real customer problem to solve and then moves onto creation of a potential solution that provides a significant customer benefit beyond alternatives.

There are some techniques that can be borrowed from Agile Software Development that can be applied to any development methodology to help focus the product requirements on delivering benefits to real user problems. The key Agile methodology used from a requirements perspective is through the process of User Roles and User Stories.

User Roles provide a means of understanding specific types of users, including their motivations and values in wanting to accomplish a task. User Stories provide simple, single goal jobs or activities the users want to accomplish using your product. In the Agile environment, the User Stories are then refined and discussed interactively during the design process to determine the overall requirements of the solution.

This same process can be used at the beginning of more traditional requirements process through the creation of Scenarios that describe the user goal and also the envisioned solution. This provides a bridge to understanding the real user problem and the product functionality. It also provides a natural next step to Use Cases, Functional and Non-functional requirements. To receive the white paper with a more detailed discussion of this process, just complete the Hot Button Survey.

Learn how to improve the requirements process for your company and products at a two-day workshop: Value-Based Requirements Workshop, hosted by Product Arts and Pivotal Product Management in Bellevue on July 16-17, 2008.

You'll create market requirements from beginning to end in a highly interactive session that will boost your success in driving customer value into your next release.