Personas are Great – For Wasting Time!

October 15, 2009 By

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Recently, I saw a couple of blog posts on this topic (here and here) from bloggers I respect a lot. This spurred me to finally get around to writing this post.

This post is about using “personas” as a part of software requirements process. It’s not about marketing, sales or other activities.

At most companies, personnel with the job title of “product managers” or “business analysts” write Requirements Documents. These documents are then used by engineering teams to build and test the software.

There’s a school of thought that says that Personas are a very useful concept as a part of gathering and documenting requirements.

Having been a part of a few teams that tried to use personas in their requirements process – I consider personas mostly a waste of time. Here’s why…
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Filed Under: Product Management, Requirements Management, User Experience Design

Use Case Template and an Example

October 8, 2009 By

In a recent post, I provided a definition of use case as well as an example.

The example I provided uses a very simple format. In most real-world projects, teams find it helpful to use a more fully-dressed format.

In this post, I share a use case template in a fully-dressed format, as well as a use case example using the template. You can even download the template as a Microsoft Word file.

Alright, here we go…
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Filed Under: Requirements Management, Use Cases

Death of Product Management at SaaS Companies…

September 23, 2009 By

Last night I got an email from a company with the subject “Saas and the death of software product management“.

And… with the subtitle of “Or, While You Weren’t Looking, Your Product Manager’s Job Became a Zombie”.

The email said the following:

The growth of the SaaS business model spells the end of product management as it’s been defined in the software industry for the last thirty years… Current product management functions such as tick list herding, MRDs, PRDs, “Agile” product management and the concept of no responsibility, no accountability, and no authority will soon be as relevant to SaaS companies as DOS 3.0 and floppy disks…

Do you think what this email says is correct? Here are my thoughts on it…
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Filed Under: Product Management

Use Cases – Top-10 Reasons for Using Them to Document Your Requirements

September 22, 2009 By

In my previous post, I provided a definition of Use Case along with an example. I also took a strong stance against considering UML diagrams as use cases.

Matt Klein made a good observation on Twitter today on how use cases are often not used well when documenting requirements:

Use Cases are important and very often not captured or documented correctly…

In this post, I’d like to share with you 10 reasons why you should use Use Cases while documenting your requirements.
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Filed Under: Requirements Management, Use Cases

Use Cases – Definition (Requirements Management Basics)

September 19, 2009 By

A question that frequently comes up in my conversations nowadays is:

What exactly is a Use Case?

Let me try and explain it in this short blog post.
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Filed Under: Requirements Management, Use Cases
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