Bring Requirements from the Customers to the Engineers

Fact

Product Pathfinder is the only product management solution that enables centralized communication and collaboration with every single person in your organization at no additional cost.

The Problem

Solving the most urgent of market problems is pointless if a product manager is unable to communicate the solution to every single person within the organization that works with the product. Databii, spreadsheets, documents, and product management software solutions might as well be locked boxes containing your market requirements. It is only sometimes easy to get information in, but is almost always impossible to get information out of these systems in a meaningful and effective form.

The Solution

In the movie Office Space, Tom Smykowski stammered that he "takes the requirements from the customers to the engineers." This is often seen as the role of Product Management – taking feature requests from customers and giving them to engineers. To be effective, however, a Product Manager must do more on both ends of the equation. Here is one way to change the statement:

It is a misconception to think that the only audience for a requirement document is the engineering team. They are simply the first to get it.

Quality assurance will probably be the next team to get the requirements. They should be written in such a way that QA can write a test case around them. The product either does or does not meet the requirements as written.

The next team to use the requirements will be the marketing and communications group. They will be used to develop a go to market plan that positions the product as a solution to the stated problem in the market. The communications team will also use the requirements as a guide when creating training manuals.

Next, the sales team will receive the requirements and marketing collateral. They will crumple them into little paper balls and throw them at each other as they run around Cancun in a drunken stupor.

Later, after the sales team has begun closing deals, the product will need to be implemented and supported. You have probably called a help desk before, only to realize that the person on the other end of the line knows absolutely nothing about either the product or why you might be using it. Making requirements available to the support team helps them provide empathetic support. They understand the problems the user is having and what is being done to help. Empathetic support translates into customer references. Customer references translate into smoother sales cycles. Smoother sales cycles translate into you not having to go on sales calls.

So Now What?

How does one communicate solutions to market problems to everybody in the company?

1. Put it in a highly-visible and centralized location,
2. Give everybody in the company access to that location, and
3. Don’t charge them any money to access it.

Product Pathfinder provides a centralized and highly-visible location for all documentation pertaining to a release. Each account has unlimited “read-only” access to this area at no additional cost. To authorize a user, you simply input their e-mail address and specify that they are a "read-only" user.

If it costs money to get the support team to access the system, they won’t access it and your effectiveness as a product manager takes a dive. If the only way the development team can get at requirements is to ask you for a report, collaboration just went south for the winter. If the executive team can’t access the financial documents supporting a release, they will have little respect for your value within the organization. If the sales team can’t access information about a release, they won’t have anything to throw at each other at the next sales meeting. Everybody must have access and it must be free.

Wrapping Up

Don’t just bring requirements from the customers to the engineers. Bring solutions to market problems to the entire company.

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