Spaghetti Sauce and Software Requirements

 

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, speaking at a 2004 TED conference, offered a story of one of his favorite Americans. Howard Moskowitz is an American market researcher and Psychophysicist, which according to WikiPedia is “the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation”[2] Moskowitz has worked for large conglomerates such as Pepsico, McDonald’s, AllState and Kraft and is principally known for creating the insane number of product variations you see at your grocery store.

Moskowitz determined that people often don’t know the range of options they would like to buy until someone presents them with the choice.
Moskowitz was retained by Campbell Soup Company, to help them grow their spaghetti sauce brand, Prego. With his team of researchers in tow, his team tested public reaction to forty-five different varieties of sauce. When analyzing the data, the researchers didn’t just look for the combination with the highest ratings. They believed people craved variety even if they didn’t know it. They grouped their data to look for clusters- patterns. When reporting back the executives he found people like three kinds of sauces: plain, spicy, and extra chunky.
For years the approach to gathering product requirements, consumer tastes, researchers would go into focus groups and say, “What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Please tell us. Not once did anyone say, ‘extra chunky’, even though in their heart they craved it.” Moskowitz revealed there was no “single sauce for the market. There were sauces”
How does a product owner manage in that environment? When you read the story it’s easy for us to see the solution. “Of course we want choices. The product development team should incorporate that into their development process.” And now, admittedly this is rather common place. At the time, however, Campbell’s soup executives were astonished to hear that over 1/3 of all Americans craved chunky spaghetti sauce and no one was providing it. When the market need was met, over $600M revenue was added to the Campbell’s Soup line.

So what does this have to do with software requirements? It is a story to illustrate the folly in thinking we can always know what our client will want, specify it and then build and deliver it. Even when you are dealing with an industry as mature as consumer goods & spaghetti sauce, we see that when your product is attempting to change the category, you need experimentation in your development cycle.
MIT professor and author of Predictably Irrational, Dan Arielly, reminds us we need to have something to compare against to settle our preference.

humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. (For instance, we don’t know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we can assume it’s more expensive than the four-cylinder model.

Until end-users and stakeholders have something to compare it against, they can be indecisive- slowing down projects. This explains the challenge with just getting people in a room and asking them to describe to you what they want. They probably don’t really know- even when they tell you.
Typically the approach we take when we  are unsure what it is we are building, we attempt to stress more documentation and more reviews. We’ve been taught that correcting a requirements error early in the life cycle saves costs down the line. We work to reduce our discomfort with the uncertainty by forcing a someone else to make a decision so we can then narrow in on our solution. We insist on a freeze in requirements and sometimes limiting participation because “too many cooks” spoils the broth- or sauce as it were. Unfortunately, we are ignoring the sometimes less than rational way people make decisions. All the process waving and feet stomping in the world won’t change the reality of the marke, meanwhile your competitor is giving your customer  chunky spaghetti sauce.

Attempting to be to deterministic in specifying our project requirements usually stifles creativity. Roger Sessions of ObjectWatch, Inc. Uses the terms directed and non-directed methodologies. Equating directed methodologies to playing the childhood game, “Hot-or-Cold”, where there truly is only one possible solution. Where as Poker is a non-directed methodology where there are multiple ways to win. Just because your client specifies the need for a straight flush doesn’t mean he won’t be happy with two pair if he wins the pot.

The practices within the application life cycle that best provide some allowance for this behavior include:

• Simulation– Using rough cut, working software simulation tools such as iRise can give clients multiple usage scenarios to evaluate.
• Integrated product design– Nothing works as well as having the entire product development team deeply involved from product concept to launch, collaborating in real time- seeing the implications of their decisions and indecision.
• Iterative development cycles– Knowing the limits of prediction, rapid feedback of working software allows for course correction in architecture and product direction before too much is sunk.
• Component Architectures– Understanding where the range of diversity in our users tastes lies then requires us to build in that flexibility.

Gladwell’s story also reminds us that solutions are a continuum. A variety of different end products and combinations will make our clients happy. Boiling down to the lowest common denominator ignores the individual and organizational diversity. It may seem logical to get the market to standardize for the best greatest use, but if that’s how we made decisions we’d all be driving Model-T’s. Thank you Mr. Moskowitz for recognizing the need for spicy sauce. Now go expand your customers range of options. Go find your secret sauces.

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