IF YOU ASK ME HOW TO SOLVE UNCLEAR CLIENT DEMANDS AND TRANSLATE THEM INTO SPECIFIC PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS, HERE’S WHAT I AM GOING TO SAY:

The thing here is that you can’t.

They are absolutely unclear.

I personally was responsible for over $8Bn of new product revenue to reach the market.

I launched huge amounts of that and was personally responsible for the different market requirements (including forecast and pricing) for about half of that.

Firstly, my suggestion to you would be to make any client demands into concrete things that need fixing or you’ll have competitors eating away your lunch.

But, it’s probably not your biggest reason to worry about, if you actually want to maximize profits.

Here’s the problem.

You need to solve a problem your current client did not even experience yet. That solution needs to hit a total of about 18 months from now.

Clients are not your only problem, you want to get PROSPECTS to come to you too, or you aren’t growing at all.

What problem are you actually solving?

Who actually needs that?

Why aren’t you insisting on them until they confess what changes do, they need, or, what would make them do business with you time and again?

Your solution however has a million features, and, each of them might have multiple benefits:

Let's take the example of a Fire Extinguisher, RED.

1. Benefit

Fire Extinguisher, which is RED, is therefore easy to see in an emergency and stands out.

2. Value

$0 If your client is color blind for real!

Here’s my favorite marketing line I have ever come across:

“JUST BECAUSE YOUR CLIENT IS ACTUALLY COLOR BLIND; DOESN’T REALLY MEAN THEY DON’T NEED A FIRE EXTINGUISHER!”

You need to thus find other feature/Benefit/Value combinations so that your primary target market is genuinely satisfied, and, peripheral users will also find enough value to use or own it.

That is how you design a product that meets needs, leapfrogs competition, and makes a lot of money and that is how you meet customer requirements that are specific in nature.

However, this whole fire extinguisher story was about my personal opinions. I did carry a bit of research as well with the sole intention of finding more about meeting unclear customer requirements and here’s what I found:

Dealing with unknown or unclear customer requirements is one of the greatest challenges one can face when it comes to managing a product.

If the client is dissatisfied with the poor or substandard quality of the product or service or unmet expectations, this could force one to increase the cost of production to correct the product's deficiencies and unmet demands.

This often is a result of not properly understanding a client's requirements from the beginning.

DIFFERENT CHALLENGES WHILE CAPTURING PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS:

It can be really difficult to translate a client's "voice" into user requirements for a product that they are seeking help with.

It often starts with an interview with the client in which you discuss the problems and seek solutions for the same. During the early stages of product developing or scoping, one needs to keep an eye out for the following red flags that can derail a company:

1. Lack of technical literacy in the client

When clients provide all their requirements, it's common for those requirements to lack emphasis on technical specifications. In this case, the risk is that the client's expectations are not at all in sync with their own requirements.

Without having complete knowledge of the process of product development and the architecture that goes into building a product, clients often assume that the complicated features will be trivial or forget to include key features entirely.

You need to be sure that you are precise while having technical discussions with non-technical clients.

2. Poor or infrequent communication between the product manager and the client

Lack of communication is really the biggest mistake that any business can make in recent times, these days.

3. A client has not fully thought through the project

A product's requirements are based on the understanding that the difference between what is really required and what is a simple "nice to have." A client's ability to understand the difference between the two is not always dependable or reliable. It is critically important to explain these two types of requirements for the success of both the client and the product development team working on it.

4. Over-ambitious product ideas

A client's vision for a product may be totally beyond the scope of their budget or even the capabilities of existing technology.

As a product manager, it is essential to flag pie-in-the-sky ideas early and to make sure that all the requirements of the product are deciphered into totally clear, achievable goals.

5. Constantly changing feature sets

Changing technical feature sets without accounting for the interrelationships with other features in a product leads to unfulfilled and unattained requirements, an increase in the costs and time taken to develop the product, and poor or substandard overall quality of the product

WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF CAPTURING PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS?

A product's specification is an important factor that is directly proportional to the final or the end result and the overall quality of the product once the development process is totally complete.

Helping a client to actually specify what exactly they are looking for from their product should be the initial step of any product development process. There are however some practices that you can follow to capture their product requirements.

·      A good way to start is to ask the client to share features from a different app they have come across that are similar to what they are looking for in their own app to be developed.

·      Ask the client for samples or drawings of exactly what they want in a feature.

·      Create a detailed Product Requirements Document for your convenience (PRD) and walk through it with the client.

·      Be very precise with user stories and the features that are going to be used to implement those stories. Cite the specific features that you think you are going to leave out if a feature is built in a certain way.

Conclusion

Poor or unclear requirements may lead to project delay or total failure and waste of resources such as time, effort, and money.

Poorly specified requirements could also lead to a lot of errors like missed project deadlines, and ultimately poorly designed and developed software in the end.