Goals, not features are the key to product success

First, let’s agree that:

Goals, not features are the key to product success.

The following diagram illustrates the product design process under ideal circumstances.

Naturally, it starts with requirements.

Requirements?! Yes, requirements. Clear and descriptive definition for what a product needs to enable — the set of system behaviors, capabilities or functionalities that must be available to support the desired product experience. Here’s an example of what that can look like.

There are various ways to format (bullet list in a google doc, digital whiteboard with an infinite canvas, etc), describe (user stories, Jobs to be done – JTBDs, Use cases and scenarios) and even classify requirements (functional, non-functional, business, ux, design, etc).

For the most part, I’m mainly interested in getting them written down, plainly, directly and with enough detail to understand why it’s useful, who needs it and how it relates to other requirements.

Writing them down is a way to formalize them — to make them official. This allows me and anyone I work with to be able to easily reference them and review them over time for clarity and completeness. Requirements also help us determine scope of work.

Requirements are ideally informed by research, and the research is ideally conducted systematically.

While it is typical to have a Product Manager or business analyst write them, on various occasions, depending on circumstances, I’ll write them myself in collaboration with whomever I’m working with — typically a Product Manager in a SAAS based product context. Sometimes a lead engineer, sometimes another designer.

Requirement Analysis

This is something I prefer to do for complex projects. Especially for highly technical domains (Financial technology, Developer tooling, enterprise software etc). It involves critically examining written requirements to determine what dependencies exist for them.

In my experience, requirement gathering and definition expertise (including maturity over it) varies greatly by environment and by individual — Some people are naturally better at it.