Yesterday I spoke with a prospective customer. They are a midsize enterprise software company, here in Silicon Valley. The reason they’re shopping for a requirements management tool?

They lost a big sales deal (worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars) because they lost track of a critical requirement when their product manager left their company…

What Sales Reps & Engineers Do Better Than Product Managers

Sales reps need to keep track of Opportunities - i.e. the list of prospective customers - and data related to these opportunities, such as call logs and tasks. Opportunities are one of the most important pieces of data tracked by sales reps at most companies. How do they keep track of this data? Using Excel or Word? Nope. Almost always using a sales force automation tool (or contact management tool) such as Salesforce.com, Saleslogix, etc.

Likewise, Engineers need to keep track of Issues - i.e. defects/bugs in their products - and data related to these bugs. How do they keep track of this data? Using Excel or Word? No again. They almost always use an issue tracking tool such as Bugzilla.

Why Not Product Managers?

Yet, product managers at most companies use Excel or Word to keep track of Requirements (or feature requests) - one of the most important data they track.

This was the case at the prospective customer I spoke with yesterday. Their old product manager had kept track of requirements in an Excel sheet. When he left, the requirements got lost because others in their organization did not have visibility into these requirements.

This is a case where a requirements management tool such as ours or the ones from our competitors would have helped immensely - just the same way sales reps and engineers benefit from their respective tools.

I think the primary reason most product managers still do not use such a tool is - Product Management is a much younger profession compared to Sales & Engineering. As the profession matures, it will adopt better tools, just like Sales & Engineering professions do today. As a matter of fact, we at Accompa (as well as our friends at our competitors) are already starting to see the beginning of such maturation.

What do you think is the reason product managers still use Excel or Word instead of better tools to track requirements? Let us know your comments.