Lesson 2 – Gathering Requirements (Part -2 ) – Product Organization –

Overview: –

Product organization, often termed as pioneers and innovators, run with a sole motive to solve problems. These problems can be those faced by the entire population or humanity or can be a breakthrough solution for businesses to improve efficiency, productivity & ultimately ROI.

Identifying these problems & further building solutions for them requires a healthy balance of competencies such as Technology, Business & Creativity

In this lesson, we will look at a few techniques, some common with service based industry, that product organizations use & practice to ideate & build business solutions

Brainstorming : –

In product organizations, it’s imperative to be creative but within the organization’s goals & vision of the product. Hence, as a product manager, you need to allow ideas to flow in from every possible direction.

Brainstorming is a technique used extensively by product based organizations to gather requirements. In brainstorming, a Product Manager invites a few participants/stakeholders of the organizations who’d be involved in the project to build the product, sets the agenda on identifying a solution to an identified problem or even identifying the problem in the first place and carefully lets the participants bombard ideas. Following points are a key while conducting and taking away from a brainstorming meeting: –

• Every idea should be acknowledged and addressed
• Have no bias or prejudice towards someone’s opinion or idea
• Ensure that a large amount of ideas are collected. This can only be achieved when you let participants shoot ideas without being judged or interrogated on.

Document Analysis: –

Although a technique we’ve discussed previously when discussing requirement gathering in service based tech industry, Document Analysis in product organizations is a different ball game

Here document analysis can start a point to get back in the right direction when the product is about to reach maturity and one feels the need to re-aligning the product back to the originally thought product vision. Here, analyzing the first set of documents becomes crucial.

Then, there can be a point where due increased competition in the Line of Business (LOB) being served or maybe your company is entering an existing saturated market, a Product Manager is asked to present a plan for the product that ensures compounded growth in ROI while being true and aligned with organization’s goals. Here’s when Gap Analysis (a subset of document analysis) can be done to understand existing gaps within the product as compared to competitors and to think of features to support & build in the due course of time.

To simply summarize document analysis, well, it’s ensuring that every possible and available piece of information needed to understand the need of the business that can be encapsulated in product should be thoroughly studied.

Focus Groups: –

A Focus Group is a gathering of people (stakeholders) who are representatives of users or users themselves, invited over a discussion on giving a feedback about the product or be presented with a prototype of new feature and ensure that in the subsequent iterations, the product delivered is an improved version that has encapsulated the feedback.

In product organizations, a Product Manager or Product Management team is constantly tasked to build features that fill the gaps or extends the attributes of the product thereby giving the organization an edge over its competitors.

Focus Groups is a technique that helps product managers to put forth their findings, ideas & assumptions in front of members of the focus group with an intention to receive feedback, build upon it in order to have a clear direction and a set of concrete requirements.

Interview: –

A technique that sometimes can be interchangeably be termed similar to focus group considering the nature of it, it’s a technique of asking the right questions to a group or cohort of stakeholders such as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Industry Leaders, Organization Leader, Clients, Implementation Specialists and even end users regarding their needs, pain areas and expectations. Their answers and feedback serve as the basis for your thoughts and ideas to be built upon in a feature of a new product itself.

Product Managers, need to recognize the perspective of each interviewee so that they can weigh in and address inputs provided.

Listening is the most important skill needed here by a PM to get most out of an interview while gathering requirements.

Practically, it is better to have atleast two distinct rounds of interviews while developing a new feature or product and gathering its requirements

Round 1 – Internal Stakeholders (Org SMEs and leaders)

Round 1 can be had with organization’s own set of SMEs who’ve been with the company for a substantially long period of time and know every minute detail regarding the product and the business. This round can be used to clarify doubts, clear assumptions and receive a feedback to build upon.

Presenting a “Prototype” helps in receiving great feedback.

Round 2 – User Cohorts, Clients, Implementation Specialists

Since these stakeholders constitute as the users of the product being built. Hence a round of interview to validate the idea and receive feedback that’ll eventually serve as a requirement proves beneficial for the product

Prototyping: –

As seen above, prototyping can be used as a tool during interviewing. But what is Prototyping?

A modern technique for gathering requirements where a Product Manager builds a prototype (a UX engineer in the field of technology) , collates a list of requirements & its supporting rules-validations, explains it to an engineer who then builds a near working model of the product that gives the audience a foresight on what the PM & organization intends to build and to have a fruitful discussion on it.

In technology, this engineer is usually a UX Engineer who builds a “clickable” version of the application without any supporting backend.

The feedback received from the presentation of the prototype serves as requirements to extend the usability of the product.

Requirement Workshop: –

A Requirement Workshop can be considered as a more structured Brainstorming Session.

Keeping the problem to be solved as the agenda to drive the session for gathering requirements & come up with solutions, a Product Manager should run the session with such clean direction.

A Product Manager should start by allowing the participants to list down all the problems pertaining to a particular workflow, feature or a task. Then eliminate redundant ones to narrow the list.

Further, allow participants to map these solutions to the problems. This will help understand & broaden the scope towards solving the problem.

Now, discuss on these problems and solutions to eventually package them into a dedicated feature or a package. Document this to have clear and concise list of requirements to build.

Survey & Questionnaire: –

It’s a technique by which one can gather unbiased, unfiltered, blunt, prejudice free views and feedback regarding problems being faced by a set of population on the product or service been sold by a company. This is achieved by asking a cohort or an entire user space a set of questions that’ll give a clarity on what needs to be addressed. These answers therefore serve as preliminary requirements to work.

With this, we conclude our 2 course session on requirement gathering. In the next lesson, I will talk about Requirement Elicitation.