Last weekend I attended a very informative (and innovative) “unconference”: Product Camp DC in Herndon, VA. Product Camp is a user-organized event of like-minded professionals. Participants offer up topics of interest and then vote on the ones to be added to the unconference agenda for the day. The professionals at this event were Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers, mostly from IT companies.
As a sponsor, I didn’t really know what to expect exactly, so I decided to participate in the process and submit a topic, “What Customers Want,” which was voted into the agenda.
My presentation http://pcampdc.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-customers-want-using-outcome.html was well received and subsequent conversations with those who attended revealed a common struggle — how to identify and manage product requirements. This issue came up again in an afternoon topic, “Developing Requirements that Don’t Suck,” a lively discussion about how to define software requirements in a way that are actionable and clear as to what is needed by users so that programmers know what to code.
Other topics dealt with challenges related to the jobs that product managers and product marketing managers are trying to get done when it comes to getting successful products to market. One of the fundamentals –understanding what a need is and formatting needs in a way so that programmers and product managers can confidently take action on them — is still a big problem today.
This fundamental problem, and the downstream product management issues that result from it, revealed itself among a few of the other presenter quotes and anecdotes captured by the conference organizers throughout the day:
“We need something between a cocktail napkin and a 900 page requirements document.” Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing
“Does this sound familiar – Here’s product #1, here’s product #2, #3. Stop me when you hear something you like.” John Mansour of ZigZag
“Has anyone ever seen a business case that looked like a loser?” John Mansour of ZigZag
So the lack of clarity in customer needs and a way to focus on the ones needed to make subsequent product management decisions is still creating havoc and uncertainty when it comes to getting successful products launched. From an Outcome-Driven Innovation champion perspective, our work is still a job-to-be-done.