A blog: Practical insights into technology & software Product Management, with special focus on building more successful products by managing requirements in a better way.
By Michael Shrivathsan on Jan 1, 2010 in General, Product Management
As we usher in the new decade, I can’t help thinking that this decade is going to be the best one yet for the discipline of high-tech product management.
Why am I so optimistic, you ask? Here are my primary reasons:
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Dec 4, 2009 in Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Roadmap
I received a fun email recently from one of our customers.
As many of you know, at Accompa we make a popular SaaS tool used as product management tool (by PM teams) and requirements management tool (by Engineering teams). Some of you may also know that I manage the Product Management & Marketing teams at Accompa.
Our customer was wondering in his email how it’s like to do product management for a product management tool! I hadn’t consciously thought about it a lot before - but his question got me thinking.
The more I thought, the more I realized there are indeed several differences. In this post, I give you an “inside peek” into the key differences in doing product management for a product management tool. Read & enjoy! 
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Nov 20, 2009 in Product Management, Requirements Management Basics, User Experience
Just a quick post to address a question that seems to come up quite frequently.
Should “User Interface” (UI) be a part of requirements? Do UI specs constitute requirements?
Here is my quick answer to this question…
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Oct 15, 2009 in Product Management, Requirements Management Basics, User Experience
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…
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Oct 8, 2009 in Requirements Management Basics, Use Cases
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 template of a fully-dressed format, as well as an example using the template. You can even download the template as a Word file.
Alright, here we go…
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Sep 23, 2009 in General, Product Management
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…
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Sep 22, 2009 in Requirements Management Basics, Use Cases
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.
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Sep 19, 2009 in Requirements Management Basics, Use Cases
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.
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Sep 15, 2009 in Product Management, User Experience
An hour ago, I did something without much conscious thought at all. I uninstalled the Twitter client I used to like (Tweetdeck), and installed a new one (Seesmic). And there I went, merrily tweeting.
Then, I caught myself and started thinking why I did that. The more I thought, the more I realized that there are a few valuable lessons in it for all of us who are involved in building software or products in general.
Here is my story, followed by the lessons…
Read the rest
By Michael Shrivathsan on Sep 9, 2009 in Product Management, User Experience
Mark Kromer at TechProdo blog recently wrote a nice blog post titled SaaS Product Management: Is there a difference?
In his post Mark poses the interesting question (applicable to a lot of product managers):
I was wondering what differences I would find in my role as a product manager if the products that I was managing moved to the software-as-a-service model…
As our company makes a popular SaaS tool for product management teams, we have good first-hand experience in this - and I’d like to share my thoughts here.
My short answer to Mark’s question is… Read the rest
Do you and your team gather and manage requirements and feature requests? These 7 practical tips will help you create more successful products.
More »
