actionable requirements
DESCRIPTION
This presentation describes the process of producing rich product requirements by collaborative game play. It also discusses the phases of product innovation in both waterfall and agile environments.TRANSCRIPT
Actionable Requirementsby Armond Mehrabian
September 21, 2010
Actionable Requirements
The challenges we face
Defining product requirements
Assessing opportunities
Discovering solutions
Tools for opportunity assessment
The process of solution discovery and definition
The agile product innovation process
Q & A
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Why is it so difficult?
Requires deep domain knowledge
Requires leadership
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Agile teams are now developing software more quickly
than ever before. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean they
are always aimed at building the right products.
-Mike Cohn
Author of Agile Estimating and Planning
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Levels of planning
What are you trying to
understand?
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Some tools for opportunity assessment
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Tools for customer understanding
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Tools for customer understanding
Actionable Requirements
Tools for customer understanding
Actionable Requirements
Tools for customer understanding
Actionable Requirements
Tools for customer understanding
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Discover what is most painful to your customers
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Understand customer’s strategic direction
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Discover what is most important to your customers
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Discover what is most important to your customers
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Discover what is most important to your customers
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Discover the unusual and exciting features for your product
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Some best practices
Have a Customer Advisory Board (CAB)
Need 2 for enterprise software
Plan 3-6 months in advance
Your team
Facilitator
Helper
Observer/Photographer
Try it on internal customers and teams first!
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Compile and consolidate learning
Revisit the planning onion
Write up the marketing requirements document (MRD)
Determine the minimal marketable feature-set (MMF)
Let’s look at an example
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A one-page opportunity assessment1) Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
2) For whom do we solve the problem? (target market)
3) How will we measure success?
4) What alternatives are out there?
5) Why we’re best suited to do this?
6) Why now?
7) How will we deploy this?
8) What is the preliminary cost?
9) What factors are critical to success?
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Why do we need product discovery?
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Prototyping
It is far more effective to sit in a chair than judge its
comfort by a picture of it.
-Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People
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Benefits of a high fidelity prototype
Provides a way to test out your ideas before spending
time and money to build them for real
Forces you to think about the problem at a much greater
level of detail
Gives developers a much greater detail product
requirement
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Conclusion
We can have a process for requirements gathering
Three phases to actionable requirements
People Tools/Artifacts
Opportunity
Assessment
Product Mkg
Product Mgmnt
Architecture
MRD
Innovation Games
Solution Discovery
and Design
User Experience
Lead Engineer
Product Mgr
PRD
Prototype
HiFi Wireframe
Solution Execution Engineering/Test
Teams
Fully functioning
product
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Resources:
Innovation Games – Luke Hohmann
Ten Faces of Innovation – Tom Kelley
Inspired – Marty Cagan
Purple Cow – Seth Godin
Agile Estimation and Planning – Mike Cohn
Dilbert – Scott Adams
Actionable Requirements
Presenter:
Armond Mehrabian
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: armond_m
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/amehrabian