In the situation of having a project initiated by a marketing or sales team, how can we capture the not so obvious requirements that the project be marketable, or even better, self marketing?
In many cases the marketing/sales team can hardly enumerate the functional specs of what the project should do, let alone describing features to track and improve metrics for performance. Having seen successful projects, I nonetheless recognize the need to not only track project performance, but to actively tweak and promote the product. What good is a new set of deals to save the customer money if no customer ever hears about or finds the deals???
One thing I’ve been thinking about doing in order to address this shortfall in the requirements process (which turns into a shortfall in the deployment process) is to dedicate a portion of the scope of the project to analysis and promotion by engineers as opposed to the marketing/sales team. For example, in order for a product to be considered launched, it would have to be reviewed by 5% of our customer base in ‘beta mode’, and go through one round of optimization/tweaking. I would then include in the scope of the project a beta promotion and review period(in addition to the QA period we already include), the creation of the appropriate survey and the engineering review of that survey, and then a final launch with any tweaks. I realize this is outside the scope of a typical technical product manager’s realm for scoping a project, but sometimes I feel like I have to step up to the plate.
What types of things should I do? This can apply to projects in many fields, but the field I am working in is web applications, so answers directed toward this area are appreciated. Of course, feel free to provide answers for all fields.
Update- An example: Recently we launched a deals project so users can get deals that our hotels provide. When building the deals project, we didn’t include an RSS feed of deals to our customers, didn’t provide an alert signup for people who are looking for specific deals, and probably missed several other opportunities to give people information the want/need in a convenient to use format. However, the deals feature is exactly what many people want, and are missing when they come to our site. Our conversion rates for deals to Disneyland are great for everyone who sees the deals, since we have such good pricing and combos, but the number of people seeing the deals is smaller since they have to know the deals are there to find them.
Prototype early, prototype often, and make sure to get customers to look at your early versions.
If you’re working on an existing system, one part of the solution is to record and trend customer complaints and requests for support. Many times, these are really enhancement requests, or they can pinpoint to painful areas of your application. If your development people are not listening to this, they’re missing out on essential customer input.