Visualizing Product Requirements and Specification

Project managers, sponsors, and engineers are spending more time on requirements gathering, analysis, and agreement than they have in the past. These stakeholders have come to realize that clearly defining and agreeing upon the requirements or specifications of the product is vital for project success and product acceptance.

For an example of this, let us look at how a hypothetical contemporary technology company developed a new product. During the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence of product management. Previously, it was the job of developers and development managers to generate their own product requirements from the broad business requirements that sponsors handed to them. Historically, interacting with customers has not been a strong suit of product development professionals. On most projects, this created a huge gap between what the customer and market really wanted and what the developers thought that the customers wanted. This approach led to the demise of many products and organizations.

From this, executives discovered – through trial by fire – that they needed personnel with expertise in customer interaction, market research, and analysis, project professionals who could understand what the market wanted and who could clearly translate these business requirements onto paper .Executives also increasingly realized that the …