Requirement Management

Product Requirement Management (PRM) is the cornerstone of product management. Yet in every project that I ever got involved, the choice of tool and process for PRM always caused heated discussion. You’ll find everyone (seriously I mean everyone: sales, engineers, executives, and product managers) has an opinion and the discussion quickly evolves into a tug of war among multiple parties.

IMHO, that’s exactly the core of the problem: PRM is a holistic problem involving multiple parties, and each party has different needs.You can’t let one party make the decision. An efficient PRM process needs to address majority , if not all, of the stakeholders’ needs. In other words, as a product manager, you need to perform requirement management of requirement management before doing anything 😉

So how to design a good PRM platform? Let me put my key points up front. then we’ll dive into where these conclusions are drawn from.

Let engineering team use the project management tool of their choice! Pick an PRM tool and Integrate it with the engineering project management tool.
Pick a PRM tool that:
- give customers and sales proper visibilities. The key word here is access control and dashboard.
- offer dashboard and reports for executives.
- enable online collaboration & communication.
- assist release planning, which a given.

There are tons of PRM tools out there. Just to name a few that I ever laid hands on:

Use cases

Customer
- A single place to submit feature requests. If the customer purchases multiple products from a company, which is often the case in the enterprise space, it’s especially important to have a single place for customers to file requests for all products.
- Track the request progress: What is the status of my requests? When can I expect them to be delivered?
- Product roadmap: What is the product roadmap? Does the product has a committed plan? How can I influence the roadmap?
Product manager
- Release planning & tracking
- Track & notify stakeholders: for each requirement and notify stakeholders when requirements change
- Collect detailed requirements. This
Executives
- Project progress:
- Stakeholder status: are customer requirements get address timely?
- Product roadmap:
Engineers
- Release planning & tracking
- Backlog

Features

Online: The RM tool has to be online! It has to enable collaborations among various roles! Forget about any kind of document that needs to be shared through email.
Collaboration: Access Control (RBAC): when field communications is involved, RBAC becames critical, e.g. customer A shouldn’t be able to see the requests from customer B; engineering team need to be protected/shielded from the field team
Workflow engine: each product has a unique way to process the requirements.
Filters/views referrable with URL: This a high valuable feature that is very often neglected.
- Links
Planning tools: Batch process
Integration with engineering tool: many engineering teams are very adament about what tool they want to use for project management.

The ideal RM solution in my opinion should have 2 parts

Dashboard for various stakeholders (Wiki, SmartSheet, …)
Backend documents datastore (JIRA, JAMA, Rally, Smartsheet, Taiga, Doors, ReqPro, … this list can go on forever)

A Chart

Here’s a requirement management solution I built for Prime Network (PN), a network management solution that manages with thousands of network gears. PN’s main challenge is to deal with large variety of routers/switches: