Thoughts on the demand management of Internet products 1-unified demand management

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, after the mention of the following." 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: "At that time was not dropped, but you have not mentioned, so in the follow-up product development of course did not consider this demand one day, the boss mentioned: a product of a very good function, so we worked overtime to develop the implementation of 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 transferred to the product and technology department. Research and Development departments take the initiative to the sales staff to understand market information, they often say: "I just sell, you first take out the product to say" a customer in the community complained: XX products xx function too bad, has complained about several times have not improved But the product and the technology innocently said: He this function relative to other product function priority is very low, so temporarily do not consider a competitor of a killer product function in fact, the company had done long ago, but then did not continue to improve, resulting in "up early, catch a late set" a product to do more and more, more and more chaos, Until one day unable to maintain the product function to find out, there are a lot of messy demand, how these requirements, now which customers are using this feature, who do not know the company level products related stakeholders are involved in the demand gathering meeting also opened many times, But the understanding of product demand is still not unified with the competitor's product comparison, product features more comprehensive than competitors, but still not competitive products, a product of some products leave, we only found that the most familiar with the product manager, there is no documentation and functional description, There are just web 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 causes of the above problems are:

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 cross-sectoral end-to-end business process to guide market demand collection and delivery work

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

1, Internet product demand Source

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:

customers want: Needs, wants market demand product package requirements: Offering requirement product demand development needs

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

1), external sources

customer needs: Suggestions and comments made by customers in the process of using the product, as well as customer interviews and other means of demand competitor product Analysis: Direct as a competitor product customer trial, access to competitor products related information social media: Search engines, IM, BBS, Blog, SNS community, Blogs, Twitter, Baidu know, and other social new media traditional media/competitor software, such as partner 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 Personnel sales Staff technical Support website user behavior analysis: including website user purchase behavior, click Stream, etc. 2, the significance of unified demand management

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

1, to establish 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 company level unified demand management tools 3, 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 4, unified demand management some thinking

1, the so-called "工欲善其事, 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 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.

Source: HTTP://WWW.YEEACH.COM/2010/04/04/Internet Products Demand management 1-unified requirements Management