Tom Grant’s witty blog post that contrasts Agile product development to Soviet central planners and their infamous five year plans got me thinking about how software projects so often fail to meet customer and corporate expectations.  Certainly the development model and development team have a huge role.  However even a perfect implementation approach can’t overcome poorly defined requirements.

The old “tire swing” cartoon says it all.  If the original definition is wrong, the poor customers don’t stand a chance of getting what they really want.  A development organization using the Agile method would discover that they missed the mark sooner than a development organization using the Waterfall method.  However, both would have wasted development resources and could easily force customers to upgrade multiple times to eventually get what they really want.   An better upfront understanding of customer needs can prevented a lot of churn, leaving all parties have been better off.

Recently, I tried a new approach to understanding customer problems.  Prior to the development team writing any code, I convened a Product Advisory Team of eight potential users to help me understand their needs so I could document the product requirements.  So far we have met six times to discuss their daily problems and possible solutions.  I must confess that my original understanding of customer needs was off base, and as a result I needed to redraft my Product Requirements Document.  That is the bad news.  The good news is that I have much more confidence that we are developing a product that will really swing.  Time will tell.

Product Management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Virtual Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.