Defining Clear and Unambiguous Product Qualities
posted by: Nick Roman on 2/19/2010
In my last post I touched upon product qualities, which are derived from stakeholder values. This time I would like to go a bit more into details.
We do our best to define our product qualities clear and unambiguous, testable, measurable, and with a clear stakeholder focus. The product qualities are defined in a repeatable way, and contain:
Name: The name of the product quality.
Scale: WHAT are we measuring?
Past: What is the current state of this product quality?
Goal: How well do we want to be quantified?
Meter: HOW do we measure the product quality (usability tests, load testing, etc.
Example: Usability; Productivity.
Scale: Time in minutes to set up a typical specified Market Research (MR) report.
Past: 65 minutes. Goal: 25 minutes (end result was 20 minutes).
Meter: Candidates with Reportal experience and with knowledge of MR-specific reporting features performed a set of predefined steps to produce an MR Report.
The focus is on the day-to-day operations of our users, not a list of features that they might or might not like.
We are careful to keep design out-of-the-equation at this stage, as it may clutter the true requirements. We leave it up to clever developers to evaluate numerous designs that can take us closer to the goal. Imposed (and sometimes bad) design can lead to solutions that are suboptimal and don’t benefit the clients.
Sometimes we are creating a totally new module, then we look for competitors or market benchmarks in order to establish a “past” value. Here’s an example of that:
Theme: New interface for ad-hoc users of Confirmit.
Usability; Intuitiveness.
Scale: The time it takes for [first-time users] to create a defined [Basic Survey].
Past: 16.5 minutes (test result using a competitor’s software).
Goal: 10 minutes.
Meter: People (students) with no experience in using survey tools were tasked to create a pre-defined survey with our new interface and a competing tool.
End result: 9 minutes.
Needless to say, it’s motivating being a developer that can deliver such quantifiable results 