A VALUABLE Rubric For Product Requirements – Podcast Episode #5

In this podcast I talk about a problem that afflicts many product companies – poor communication between product management and developers. And I describe an approach that can help improve the communication, and improve everyone’s motivation – a new rubric for writing good requirements which I call VALUABLE. That’s an acronym for: Valuable, Aligned, Loved, Understood, Acceptance tests, Bounded, Leverages, and Expected Usage. It will all become clear when you listen to the podcast – or download the infographic.

The infographic I mention in the podcast is here – please feel free to download it and print it out and put it up on your wall. Or whatever you want to do with it.

In the podcast I mentioned a number of earlier posts, a book, and some useful posts on other peoples’ blogs.

Links

• You can find Scott Selhorst’s Big 10 Rules For Writing Good Requirements on his excellent blog Tyner-Blain.
• Dan Pink’s Drive book is terrific. Kathy Sierra says “It’s the best summary of self-determination theory,” by which she means “It explains a ton of how and why we act the way we do, including what really motivates us to do stuff.” (By the way, you cannot go wrong watching this Kathy Sierra talk from the 2012 Business Of Software Conference – I recommend it constantly.)
• I wrote recently about the product management lexicon and why it’s time to rethink a lot of the words we’re using, often because we’ve just inherited them from “IT” – Information Technology – and while they sound like they apply to product management, they really don’t.
• One of my favorite techniques for quality requirements is the “Impact Areas” concept, which should be part of the table of contents of your requirements.
• Templates and other guides are covered in the extract from the first chapter of my (in-progress, not-yet-finished) book.
• My thinking about how interesting things – that is, new product capabilities that provide significant value to customers – are usually not estimatable, even if we are confident that they are “attainable,” to use Scott Selhorst’s phrase.

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