Few Critical Aspects of Software Product Management
Gurava Maruri
Director Product Management at Algonomy | E-commerce Personalization Product Leader | Ex-Oracle| Ex-ADP | Driving the Future of E-commerce Experiences.
Requirements Vs Implementation (or Execution) : What Vs How
Product Managers/Business Analysts need to define requirements. Requirement talks about - what is the user need or business need or system need and that is what PM/BAs need to understand and define.
It is extremely important to draw a line between what is a requirement Vs what is implementation. Delivery teams are effective when requirements are given to them to develop. It gives them an opportunity to understand the needs and come up with a solution (or) different solutions through which the problem can be solved. After all engineers are problem solvers. As they understand the tools and technologies, they know the best way to implement the requirement. Bringing User Experience team probably is a good idea given UX team has the context of the business/product/user.
One of the issues we may face If PM/BA define implementation rather than requirement is - Dev may not want to against them Or they may not come up with a better way to solve the problem.
Examples Vs Abstractions
When PM/BA define requirements they look at some of the examples and then abstract the requirement. The difficulty with this process is, they may articulate the problem statement in a difficult and complex manner as they need to define the requirement which needed to be abstracted from all the examples.
It is extremely important to list all examples along with the problem statement/requirement, so that it provides absolute clarity of what is expected of the requirement and also what is the basis for the requirement.
This will help the Dev/QA teams to come up with more practical and real time scenarios along with what they generally do.
Prioritization : Data Driven Vs Experience
Most of the Product Managers/Product Owners prioritize based on their understanding of systems/products/users/market. And through my experience where we started going a bit deep off late and realized evidence based prioritization (At least feature level or problem statement level) is extremely important. Data does not lie.