It’s the age-old question of product management and product development: how do you balance customer problems and requests with the features and initiatives that will help bring in new customers and grow your business?

In this week’s Forbes article ‘Making Software Development Fast, Effective & Intelligent,’ author Tom Groenfeldt highlights that “simply pleasing your existing customers can lock you into products that serve past, rather than future needs in the marketplace.”

Big Data. First companies collected it, then they processed it, and then they trapped it, siloed it, and caused the collective scratching of heads. Voila, a new data problem of mass proportion.

Join Accept Software and Shawn O’Leary tomorrow at Product Camp Minnesota for a Q&A Session with Jamie Vander Hagen, Director Software Management for Consumer Lending at Wolters Kluwer Financial Services.

Q&A forum: Runaway Product Requirements: Taming the Chaos of Product Management

ProductCamp Minnesota 3
Saturday, November 12, 2011 from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM (CT)
University of St Thomas - Minneapolis
Schulze Hall
1000 Lasalle Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403

Recapping the past week and introducing the next.

Tom Grant at Forrester writes an excellent blog on product management, in which he recently graced us by mentioning Accept in his post on "The Unrecognized Success of the Requirements Tool Market." To be sure, awareness for solutions like ours is growing fast. In fact in our latest earnings announcement we highlighted record financial results and aggressive expansion plans.

Tom asks his readers why there's a sudden interest in requirements tools and the business problem they're tied to. You'll have to read Tom's blog to get his own answer to the question in an upcoming post, but we also thought we'd let you know what we think here.

Innovation has been the lifeblood of high-tech companies, so why is interest on the rise just now?

This is the third and final post in this Scaling Agile series. I've written about the triangle of traps, the challenges of developing complex systems, and smart requirements and intelligent backlogs. In a recent conversation with John Haniotis, VP of Products at Accept, we discussed how to ensure successful adoption of agile methodologies in a large company. John’s experience with enterprise wide adoption of agile (at Intuit) points to two areas to pay attention to: mitigating risk of organizational change and managing the transition.

What are the RIGHT requirements? It used to be you planned a release and listed the must-haves and got them... Eventually

But with agile we get the product backlog faster... Yeah? i.e are those the Right requirements?

Who owns the definition of the right requirements?

Q1: What are the top three Requirements/Features in your next product release?

Q2: How do the top three help address your long-term product strategy?

Q3: If you had been planning this release six months ago or six months from now, would the top three still be the same?