Clear Product Requirements

Using the Fit-for-Purpose Framework, Archetypes & the Universal Feature Template

How do you know whether a change to a product or service will represent an improvement? How do you select new features, functions and classes of service? How do you define those features and functions in a clear, unambiguous and testable fashion? Do you understand the difference between a functional requirement and a non-functional requirement specific to the fidelity and quality of implementation? Do you recognize that all products and services have design, implementation and service delivery (or experience of consumption) requirements? And when you should focus on which of those elements in order to drive the maximum customer value?

This 1-day class is developed from a combination of elements from the recent book, Fit for Purpose – How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep customers, by David J. Anderson & Alexei Zheglov, and David’s work with Peter Coad in the late 1990s developing the requirements archetypes and the universal feature template.

This class will offer you significant new insights, and powerful, elegant and simply ways to explore and define better requirements for your products and services.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand that all products or services have design, implementation and service delivery elements
• Learn how to identify and describe the design, implementation and service delivery elements
• Understand how to recognize and define or describe a customer purpose
• Understand the 4 types of metrics: Fitness Criteria (used to select your product or service in the market); general health indicators; improvement drivers and vanity metrics
• Understand that fitness criteria lead directly to product or service requirements
• Understand the 4 commonly recurring types of fitness criteria: Lead Time; Quality; Safety & Conformance; and Affordability.
• Understand how to define thresholds of acceptable “table stakes” performance and exceptional, disruption enabling “differentiating” performance
• Recognize the 3 aspects of lead time (or time-to-market) as timeliness, predictability and duration, and learn how to describe them and when and how to recognize which is applicable.
• Understand the difference between functional and non-functional requirements
• Learn how to describe and specify requirements in a measurable fashion
• Learn how to define a product domain using the 4 requirements archetypes (moments|intervals of time, roles, products|places|things & descriptions), the universal requirements model, and the feature definition template
• Demonstrate an ability to define features cleanly as functional requirements, together with acceptable “tables stakes” or exceptional “differentiating” levels of non-functional performance, quality or fidelity

Who Should Attend?
This class is for business analysts, product owners, program managers, product architects, and marketing professionals who define and specify products or services.

This class is useful for anyone who wants to understand how to quickly develop clear, unambiguous, testable, fine-grained requirements in a collaborative fashion that leads to a strong shared understanding of what is intended and what “done” looks like.

Prerequisites:
There are no specific prerequisites for this class. It is recommended that attendees have product marketing, product management, service design, business analysis, or Agile product owner experience. A business or technical degree or formal qualification in business or systems analysis and design is not necessary but attendees with such a background may find the contrasts with familiar material to be either interest or challenging. Prior knowledge or experience with Use Cases, User Stories, Goal-driven Design, Business Rules, Business Process Modeling, Object-relational modeling or requirements domain modeling may be useful and may reveal some strong contrasts in approach.

Course Outline:

Agenda

• Understanding Customer Purpose and describing it
• Understanding Design, Implementation and Service Delivery elements in a product or service and developing the skill to describe and categorize them accurately
• Learn when to focus on design (features for customer use), implementation (features to make a product or service easier, cheaper, faster to produce), service delivery or experience of consumption (business model innovation, or service delivery capabilities)

Break

• Learn how Fitness Criteria have thresholds of “table stakes” and “differentiating” performance
• Learn how to explore their definitions and how to measure them
• 4 Commonly recurring fitness criteria: Lead time; Quality; Safety & Conformance; Affordability/Price

Lunch

• Understanding the four requirements archetypes and how to model relationships between them using simple tools such a 4-color sticky notes, mapped in the universal requirements domain shape

Break

• Understand the construction of the universal feature template and how to read requirements straight off the model
• Integrating fitness criteria thresholds with functional requirements
• Discussion: Insights from today’s lessons. How will Fit for Purpose and requirements domain modeling affect how you develop requirements? What will you change? How might you integrate the ideas with things you already do? What are the actionable, pragmatic ideas you are taking away and intend to implement?

Class Materials:
All students will receive a read only student edit of the classroom Powerpoint, a copy of the 2nd Edition of the book, Fit for Purpose – How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers by David J. Anderson & Alexei Zheglov, and a printed copy of the Fit for Purpose infographic poster.

Students will receive a certificate of completion recognizing participation in the class.