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.

1. Actionable Requirements
by Armond Mehrabian
September 21, 2010

2. 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

6. Actionable Requirements
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

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 Tools for customer understanding

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 Tools for customer understanding

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 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

23. Actionable Requirements
A one-page opportunity assessment
1) 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 Product Mkg MRD
Assessment Product Mgmnt Innovation Games
Architecture
Solution Discovery User Experience PRD
and Design Lead Engineer Prototype
Product Mgr HiFi Wireframe
Solution Execution Engineering/Test Fully functioning
Teams 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

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Presenter:
 Armond Mehrabian
 Email: amehrabian@portofinosolutions.com
 Twitter: armond_m
 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/amehrabian