In a product development cycle, everything starts from requirement. The first misconception stands out from here - things start from somewhere, so we must know where it is. We make a lot of assumptions about what we know, what people want, what we donot know, what people donot want. Yes, unfortunately, most of us start from 'we'. I think it is inevitable. This is how our brain works - when it comes across new problems, new stimuli, it first of all is to search the potential resonance. During this stage, learning and extraction following by inference happens. Any requirement analysis approaches fail to respect this are likely to be doomed.
Traditional practitioners believed this planet is the centre of the universe. On that thread, they had this fantasy either the designers are fully aware of what is required from their past lives or they are just genius, just know it. After many pioneers hit their heads on the wall, with only handful of them hit the dice, we finally decide to collect and analyse requirements. Now is the era of believers. People have this naïve belief in customers, or who would buy the thing we are gonna build. Tons of man hours, lots of support to airline economy didn't seem to pay off - this gap between what customers are satisfied at and what has been delivered is like a haunting ghost, never go away. Most of the products have to have sufficient investment to sustain till we 'finally' hit somewhere in between, or better than competition, or customers do not really have much choice. Surely there are still many very successful products coming out from the bottom of these waterfalls. Many products of this kind took long time with concentrated resource and reasonably static market environment.
Steadily, we started to realise that customer is NOT our mentor, he doesn't know what we assumed he does, hoping by doing that our development lives would be easier. As matter of fact, customer doesn't have clear view of what he is asking for, only knowing there is something alike to meet his needs. Even further, sometime customer doesn't know what he really needs. As I have explained in previous blog, he thought he wants XYZ, in fact all he wants is to achieve ABC, and he think by XYZ he could make it happen. As product development go along, the requirement creeps. This is natural since the better visibility of the product, people who look at it would have more information to feed their brain and that would either trigger a verification process, or a inventive process will be triggered to re-shape and enrich original fluffy fuzzy needs. With all these cruel realities being exposed on the floor, alongside the acceleration of market changing speed, we have to look for alternatives.
One thing also worth mentioning is, no matter what, there is always a conceptual understanding that product is delayed, in fact, what is important is managing the expectation. By the way, with second law of thermodynamics, you can not win; you can not break even; you can never get out of the game.
I don't know exactly what to do, but these are what I believe should be happening within a success,
» Customer is God. This is a correct statement only within appropriate context. Product development team should lead customer to find out about their real needs. Hence customer is not just paying for the end product, but also the learning process and experience. This would make sense for our accountants whose only interest seems to be costs and benefits (to be fair, we all do).
» There is no way anyone can envisage hence plan all out in advance. Even there is a small fraction of possibility, that would also decreased in a significantly non-linear manner to the degree of complexity and speed of change.
» What we can do is be honest with ourselves and plan out what our eyes can see in front of us. In the same time, knowing how to use the back of envelope estimate as a guidance rather than a full time project manager's job to cook a good-looking chart.
» Commitment is a serious business. Without a feeling of fixture doesn't mean no commitment needs to be made. Be aware that every step you make in product development, every deliverable coming out from the circular pipe would have directional effects on what is going to happen in the next ones.
» Break the cost, time, quality triangle. Define the affordable time and cost then see what we can deliver.
Knock out features are those hit the invention button, not only because they have been implemented by genius who is capable of peeking the wonderful requirement myth above, but also the designer is consciously delivering altruism - probing the user's curiosity, allowing them to explore more with this product rather than less. The reason that I say this is I believe every product, every new gadget in a way limited your option, you view of the world while it offers you certain ability from the vehicle. When we say a product is intuitive, what we are really saying is the product doesn't limit the way we look,feel and deal with things by what it offers. Just like dad used to say, "you can go ski, as long as you put on those clumsy clothes" or "you can use a blackberry, as long as you can live with tiny keyboard hurt your hands".
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