Internet product demand management: Product management process

For Internet companies, product demand management is the core of product development, product demand is correct or not directly affect product development cycle, product development costs, product operating costs, and even directly determine the product market competitiveness. According to statistics: The problem of 40%~60% in product development is the "Bane" in the stage of demand, and the problem of demand stage implantation is found in the test phase and operation phase, and the cost is 68~200 times of discovering the problem in the demand stage.

There are a lot of stories about requirements management, and some common questions are listed:

• One day the boss asked: I had a long time ago, mentioned a demand, and then there is no later. The product manager said innocently: Have you mentioned it to me?
• Some sales talk about: I have long ago mentioned a demand, at that time was the product is not lost, feel unimportant, now the competitor relies on this function to win many customers. The product manager innocently said: "It was not lost, but you never mentioned, so in the follow-up product development of course did not consider this requirement
• One day the boss mentioned that a product is a good feature, so we worked overtime to achieve similar functions. Wait until the product developed to start looking for customers, to find selling points.
• Sales complain: Product personnel, developers behind closed doors, only focus on technology, not focus on customer needs. Products and Technology innocently said: "The sales staff are not clear about the requirements, we have developed according to their needs, they are not satisfied."
• The sales staff only completes the sales target, the information that the customer reflects cannot be passed to the product and technology department. When research and Development department take the initiative to the sales staff to understand the market information, they often say: "I just sell, you first bring out the product to say."
• A customer in the community complained: XX products xx function is too bad, has complained about several times have not improved; but the product and the technology innocently said: He this function relative to the other product function priority is very low, therefore temporarily does not consider
• The ability of a competitor to have a killer product in fact, the company did a long time ago, but then did not continue to improve, resulting in "up early, catch a late set"
• A product more and more to do the more chaos, until one day can not maintain the product function before the reorganization found that there is a mess of demand, these requirements how to come, now which customers are using this function, who do not know
• Company-level product-related stakeholders have participated in the demand gathering meeting also opened many times, but there is no unified understanding of product requirements
• Compared with competitor's product, the product function is more comprehensive than the competitor's, but it still competes the competitor's product
• A product left, we only found that the most familiar with the product managers only this product manager, there is no documentation and functional description, and some just site pages and code

For most Internet companies, are aware of the importance of product management, so there is a corresponding product management process, but why the above problems are still common?

The root cause of the above problems is:

1. No effective layering of requirements, no clear definition of objectives for different phases

2), did not establish a marketing and product development departments across the organization to unify the responsibility to collect market demand, and transfer it to the product development team

3, lack of complete demand collection, summary, analysis mechanism, "the company nerve endings and brain lost contact";

4), did not establish a set of cross-sectoral end-to-end business processes to guide market demand collection and delivery work

5, not a customer demand analysis tool to guide the systematic collection of customer needs

1. The source of Internet product demand

A mention of demand management, product personnel and technical staff will say in unison: Software requirements Management, we have AH. Our software development process follows the development process of CMMI3, RUP, XP, and scrum, and requirements management is the most important phase of our development.

The "Requirements" we refer to here are not simply technical terms of product requirements, software requirements, but also include:

• What the customer wants: Needs, wants
• Market demand
• Product Package requirements: offering requirement
• Product Requirements
• Development Requirements

Compared with the traditional software development process, the demand management sources of Internet enterprises are more diverse, including:

1), external sources

• Customer Requirements: Suggestions and comments from customers in the process of using the product, and requirements through customer interviews
• Competitor Product Analysis: Directly as a competitor product customer trial, access to competitor product related information
• Social media: Search engine, IM, BBS, blog, SNS community, blog, Twitter, Baidu know new social media
• Traditional media/Competitor soft text, etc.
• Our Partners
• Industry Analysis

Some competitor analysis means may refer to the electronic Commerce Enterprise Competitive Intelligence analysis tool

2), internal sources

• Company Product Strategy
• Customer service personnel: including call center (telephone, SMS, fax, mail, etc.), online customers (IM, BBS, message board, Webcall, etc.)
• Operators: the so-called Internet products are operating out, any successful products can not be achieved overnight. The demand generated by the internal operations of the company is an important source of demand.
• Marketing Staff
• Sales Staff
• Financial staff
• Technical support
• Website user behavior analysis: including website user purchase behavior, click Stream, etc.

2, the significance of unified demand management

The diversification of demand sources requires a unified management of requirements at the corporate level to ensure that:

1), the establishment of end-to-end demand management process, to achieve seamless integration of technology and market.

2, in-depth understanding of the industry, to become industry experts: for the Internet enterprises, must understand the characteristics of the industry and industry users of pain points to be able to launch a competitive product, it must first become the industry experts. The essence of product demand represents the needs of the industry users, through the continuous accumulation of product needs, can deepen understanding of the industry, thus becoming industry experts, can launch more in line with industry needs of products

3, the Inheritance of knowledge: through the continuous unified management of demand can ensure the inheritance of knowledge, to avoid product demand knowledge accumulated in several people's heads.

4), actively collect demand, accurately grasp the market opportunity point

5, Product Innovation: through the product and product between the original demand optimization, reference, combination and other means to achieve product innovation purposes.

What we call "unified demand management" here is broader than in Rup, including:

• Company-level unified demand management organization support system
• Company-level unified demand management process system
• Unified demand management tools at the company level

4. How to achieve unified demand management

The IPD process adopted by Huawei and IBM is very useful in realizing the unified management of the company level, and the core idea is:

1), organization support

To unify the collection of market requirements and transfer them to the product development team by establishing an organization across the market and product development sectors

2), end-to-end process

The so-called "end-to-end process" is different from the functional product development model, the establishment of the product development process is cross-sectoral, focus on business implementation, customer to customer business processes. There are three major process systems related to product demand in enterprises: market management process, product development process, and demand development process. The first phase of the market management process (understanding the market phase), the first phase of the product development process (concept phase) defines the collection activities of the customer requirements, and the demand development process is used to support the requirements gathering activities.

Can refer to: Huawei IPD Process Management

5, unified demand management some thinking

1, the so-called "工欲善其事, its prerequisite", a good demand management tool for demand management has a great help. But the tools are not everything, the key or the people who use the tools, so instead of looking for the perfect tool all day, ask yourself: how long can we hold on to the use of the tools?

2), the tool itself does not solve the dilemma of demand management confusion. The core question is whether the methodology and process system of demand management can be perfected continuously. One of the secrets of Successful demand management is: continuous accumulation, continuous improvement.

3, we often busy to open up new market demand and forget the sum of value. With customers, marketing, sales, products, technology, operations and other related personnel on a regular basis to accumulate a variety of needs (not simply product requirements) for the "requirement review" (similar to the "Cod Review"), can collide and excavate a lot of valuable product demand and selling points.

4, for the operation of enterprises, a variety of industry needs of the continuous accumulation of the enterprise is one of the most valuable wealth, but also the source of product innovation. Therefore, the continuous demand accumulation should be promoted to the corporate strategic level.