What and Why:
Requirements Management is a process of elicitation, triage, analysis, selection, specification and selection of requirements in a systematic way for the product or solution. It is the most critical process for effective definition of product / IP solution. Requirements for the IP solution can be obtained from:
- Market requirements – Derived from Market analysis which should include competition products study.
- Customer specific requirements – collection of various customer requirements.
- Innovation and Research – inputs received from internal teams involved in innovation, research & development or Center of Excellence.
The key artifacts in the process of requirements management include:
- Requirements backlog: It is a simple collection of the requirements/expectations from all the different sources.
- Market Requirements Document (MRD): This document is used to capture the requirements from a market perspective considering use cases, challenges, functionalities from customer or user perspective. In general, MRD does not get into in-depth technical details. It will be used as base for developing Roadmap and Product Requirements Documents.
- Product Requirements Document (PRD): It is a document that defines the product or the IP solution. This document shall be treated as specification for the product to be implemented. PRD is prepared based on the inputs from MRD. It will be used as input for Release Plan preparation and planning various development projects. Each requirement shall have priority assigned to help in defining the product releases.
Who, How and Best Practices:
The complete Product management team (i.e. Product strategist/head, along with product marketing manager and product technical manager) shall be responsible for requirements management process.
The requirements management can be implemented in the following different stages:
Elicitation: It is the process of collecting and documenting the information received from various sources like
- Customers through discussions, feedback, workshops, surveys,
- Competition analysis
- Market analysis about trends, user behaviors, changing business models/pricing, technology
- Internal sources of Innovation, CoEs, Idea campaigns, development/testing teams,
All such requirements are maintained some kind of system as backlog.
Triage: It is the first level of analysis and the filter to decide if a particular requirement can be considered in the scope of product or not. This triaging process depends on the product scope, strategy and vision. In scope requirements are documented as part of Market Requirements Document (MRD).
Product marketing manager along with product strategist shall be involved in Elicitation and Triage activities. Marketing requirements document (MRD) shall be prepared by the product marketing manager.
Analysis: Once we have list of requirements which are considered within the scope of product vision. We will perform analysis of requirements based on various parameters like Technology, Architecture, platform, value addition, required resources & investments etc..
Specification: Each requirement after analysis and considered for product shall be documented. Detailing out of such requirement will be done as part of product specification and documented as part of Product Requirements Document (PRD).
Product Technical manager shall be responsible for preparation of Product Requirements document.
Each of such requirements defined in PRD shall be included in product roadmap and release plan for future implementation.
Notes:
- In some situations is may not be necessary to prepare all the artifacts defined above. Product management team shall decide on the same. It typically depends on the product / IP solution. The decision to keep either both or any one should be done keeping in mind about balancing the efforts/investments and the returns/benefits.
- In some situations both MRD and PRD can be integrated into one comprehensive Product Requirements Document, if proposed product / IP solution considerably small in size and with nominal investments/efforts, solution is addressing a window of opportunity with shorter expected life cycle, and it is highly standardized solution.
- However it is recommended to have both the documents if product/ IP solution significantly large in size and investments/efforts are high, Market expectation is highly diverse in nature, there is high inflow or too many requirements from different stake holders, the solution/product is expected to address a dynamic market and product is expected to have long product life cycle.
- Product management team can also obtain guidance and support from Central IP team in the process of requirements management for the solutions in Ready2Series portfolio.
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