Things you wish your Software Product Manager knows - Requirements

Most product managers/ops managers don't really know much about software developments but they do know management.

A good example is the word requirements. Most of the time the product manager will spend some time crafting out the business requirements/operational requirements in order to get management approval to go ahead with the project. After getting approval the product manager would pass these business requirements to the development team and probably say something like,

Manager : "Here are the requirements now go build me something".

Development team : "Now we need to do some requirement gathering"

Manager : "What do you mean you need to gather more requirements, I took a few months asking all the managers what the requirements are, I already asked all the ground users what the requirements are, don't waste anymore time , now go build me the system. "

and so on....

That's more or less what happened to me, then as my team around asking end users if they heard about my project and what's the aims are, no one seems to know much. So every user meeting we went to we gotta explain what the vsion of the project was and what we think their roles in the project is and how they can contribute.

So what product managers should know that there are many types of requirements, namely business, functional, user and system requirements. And they are all needed in order to build a system. What the product manager wrote to management in order to get the project moving is usually a mixture of Business and User Requirements.

So what are the various requirements that you need?

Business/Operational Requirements - Usually stated in terms of what must be accomplished to achieve value to the business.

User Requirements- Describe what the users are able to do, usually model thru use cases or user stories. Examples would be like - "User would be able to make a reservation:, "User would be able to edit his personal information"

Functional Requirements - What the system needs to do in order to fufill the User Requirements, like we need to have logins tied to the LDAP server, or we need send email notification and so on. Things the developement team might need to build in order to satisfy the use cases.