Building incredible software, whether it’s for mobile apps, wearable devices, or desktop computers, requires careful strategy and attention to detail.
However, when you’re swept up in the excitement of taking your idea to market, it’s easy to lose sight of things like plan and feasibility.
One of the easiest ways to make sure that you create something powerful, compelling, and realistic for your chosen market, is to create a Product Requirements Document, or “PRD.”
Product requirements strategies can help businesses to identify the risk in their projects, establish technical demands, and ensure that every stakeholder thoroughly understands the objective of the new development process.
What is Requirements Management?
Requirements can be the foundation of any successful product development process. They define exactly what you’re trying to create and determine what a product needs to do to be successful.
As the complexity of your creation increases, the requirements necessary to support your development will evolve too.
Requirements:
- Get your team on the same page and eliminate confusion
- Identify what a product should do and how it should perform
- Describe the product’s value and functionality
The process of tracking and defining product requirements isn’t a responsibility that belongs to just one team member. The entire business needs to think carefully about how requirements are going to be met with new products.
For instance, product managers will request features that determine how the product solves a specific problem, while designers indicate how a product will perform and look from a usability standpoint.
When product requirement documents and processes are overlooked in an attempt to get ideas into the market faster, the result can be increased project timelines and higher costs.
The majority of the product’s software development cost comes down to the reworks and changes that need to be made based on a misaligned or misunderstood set of requirements.
Improving Project Outcomes With Requirement Management
Development teams can frequently end up wasting their budgets without the right requirements to guide them.
Lack of a product requirement document often leads to things needing to be redone or fixed before a product can go to market.
On the other hand, a successful strategy for requirements management can easily eliminate up to 80% of the project defects that can occur during development.
People work more seamlessly and effectively together when everyone is on the same page.
Some of the most sophisticated software applications and products require thousands of requirements to help fully define the scope of a project.
Some of the most important pillars that go into product requirement documents include:
#1 Clear Requirements
Any requirement included in a product development plan needs to be clear, valuable and actionable. People need to be able to see how that requirement creates a solution to a problem, and why it’s necessary for the product.
The best requirements answer the question, “What do we need, and how can we fulfill that need?”
With accurate requirements, stakeholders also get to see what their part in a product’s development lifecycle is, as well as getting a reminder of the value in the product.
#2 Complete Collaboration
In some cases, the most challenging part of managing requirements for a business is getting full buy-in from every person in the company.
However, collaboration is key to establishing an effective product development roadmap.
It’s important for everyone in your group to understand where the value is coming from with each requirement, and that stakeholders feel as though they’re “in the loop” on progress.
Make sure that good collaboration and communication is at the heart of your strategy.
#3 Traceability
Another essential element of requirement management is traceability. This is how you make sure that everyone in your organization is up-to-date on what’s going on with your product development.
Companies should be able to trace the requirements in their product back to the original business objective that they were designed to serve.
This will help business leaders to see the ripple effect that each requirement and change has on the company and the product.
#4 Quality Assurance
Finally, getting requirements right the first time around means that you end up withfaster development cycles, better times to market, improved quality, and happier customers too.
Specific and concise requirements will help business leaders to more easily detect and solve the problem before new software, and product updates are released.
When requirements are properly met, then the newly developed product is more likely to meet all of the right expectations.
Managing quality assurance is crucial with any kind of product development lifecycle, whether you’re building a new mobile app or a piece of cloud computing software.
Remember, it can cost anywhere up to 100 times more to attempt to correct an issue later on in the development process. Getting everything right first time around will save significant time and money.
Don’t Underestimate The Value of Requirements
It’s easy to get ahead of yourself when you’re building new and exciting software for your marketplace. However, the last thing you want to do is damage your reputation by delivering a product before it’s truly ready.
Integrating requirements management into your full product development lifecycle will help you to eliminate the risk that you’ll need to rework and fix issues later on.
The time and cost savings that come from using requirements in your projects can’t be underestimated.
