Managing requirements, roadmaps, and resources with greater speed and certainty.

Of all the products and features you could be building, which ones should you build? The answer is in your requirements. The key is in measuring and managing requirements objectively – not by “gut feel” – so you can shift product portfolio investments to more value- and differentiation-producing tasks and make the best use of scarce product development resources.

This can be accomplished by systematically capturing and centralizing requirements, then linking and weighting each requirement with key business drivers, including markets, competitors, risks, company strategy, resources, and budgets. Only then can you properly prioritize requirements and improve your product development process.

Some of the best ways to achieve this include:

• Streamline idea capture to drive product requirements based on what customers want and need, and align plans with company strategy.
• Create a centralized repository of all market, customer, competitive, and requirements data. This can save up to 15-20% of each product manager’s time that would otherwise be wasted sifting through files, knowledge bases, spreadsheets, email, even post-it notes.
• Establish an idea community enabling all stakeholders to collaborate on enhancing and refining requirements. In addition to customers, this community may include distributed product teams, suppliers, and partners.
• Organize backlogged requirements into iterations/sprints. This is particularly important for Scrum and other Agile development methodologies.
• Use workflow and graphical and other management reports to monitor and measure progress and ensure products hit their target windows.
• Employ techniques such as scenario planning; feature and product plan comparisons; and categorizing tasks and requirements by objective to demonstrate the alignment of each requirement with customer needs, competitive strategy, and corporate goals.
  
  

Accept Requirements is an on-demand requirements management software solution that helps you deliver more successful products and services to market faster. By tightly integrating with Accept Idea Management software and Portfolio Management software, Accept ensures you capture and prioritize requirements, align requirements with company strategy, and unify execution across product teams.

Learn more about Accept’s suite of innovation software products to find out how you can deliver better products to market more swiftly.