Insights on Early Stage Requirement Gathering
Last week I was struggling with trying to understand my employer’s business needs when it came to a feature redesign. Since we usually followed an informal discussion which later drilled down into design tasks, I was not able to distinguish between what he wanted versus what I expected from him as a designer.
Quickly, I turned to the one source where I could get some advice : Design Twitter.
I reached out to a lot of folks in various design and PM roles at Swiggy, Myntra, Obvious, Gojek , OLX people; startups such as Markk, Lokal and independent designers to understand how they approach this process.
Context
I work at a yet to launch B2B fintech startup which provides mortgage solutions to loan officers at SMBs and banks. We designed and built this application on Salesforce. Currently, we are rethinking a feature design for which I was supposed to understand business requirements. My constraints were :
- Early stage, hence no access to users or data
- Small remote team with business stakeholders situated in the US
- No product manager role
Based on these constraints I asked them questions, which gave rise to various insights. I thought I’d write it down so I or anyone who was curious about the same could refer to. Here’s what I took away :
If you do not have access to users or data …
Focus on purpose
Brainstorm with your CEO, business stakeholders, sales person what is the purpose and motivation behind the particular feature. Have repeated conversations and document key insights with regular feedback from them on the same. Prepare a product requirement document with these insights. This will help you set objective design goals which are in alignment with your business goals.
In my case, since we did not have users, I would have to reply on my assumptions and the understanding I had about the mortgage industry.
Generally, there are two ways in which one can approach these problems - Qualitatively and Quantitatively.Depending on the market scenario, every business will define its strategy - whether they want to focus on quality or quantity. - Vaibhav Bhalekar, OLX People
Competitor Analysis
Since you do not have customer feedback, find out what competitors in your industry are doing, what is working for them and what can be improved. This could give you an idea about what outcomes you could solve for.
Build an “MVP” feature
In order to collect quick feedback from target users, release a minimal viable product with the feature. This is however, contextual as it depends on the available resources, accessibility to users, business priorities ..etc.
In the world of B2B, measuring user’s productivity is the north star. Delight is secondary, focus on making the product functional. — RAHUL DAS, Myntra
Vikalp Gupta(Vikalp) from Obvious was kind enough to get on a call and do a mini exercise with me to help me understand the process they follow :
a. What are the main goal(s) for the feature
b. What are the problems which might occur in achieving the goal (act as a
user)
c. Solutions on how to achieve the goal(s)
d. Sketch multiple flows for each solution.
I remembered a twitter thread which explains how they carry this out :
In case you DO have users + data (so lucky)
Ask for a POC and related user data
This is similar to the above process but with an advantage of looking at numbers and projections such as the current or expected DAU(Daily Average Users), WAU(Weekly Average Users) and MAU(Monthly Average Users). these metrics are generally provided to you by a PM(product manager). Ask questions on what metrics is the team focusing on and how these metrics are affected with the user’s actions. This will help you translate the business requirements into design targets.
“Don’t talk about product or design, focus on the purely the business aspect in layman terms.” — Prasanna Venkatesh, Swiggy
If you have access to your primary users, pay attention to the feedback they provide. This will help you focus your goals on improving that aspect of the product and see if your business is aligned to the same or not.
Create a feature roadmap and iterate at each point
Keep making iterations on your research as you gain more insights while coming up with solutions. While doing so, have regular calls with the founders, relevant teams etc to narrow down to the solution which bridges all the gaps.
Business targets should always be a number. Once we get business targets, we work on the roadmap which is then broken down into one or two week sprints. If we are to fail, we always prefer our MVPs to fail than our product features. — Pushkar Dongare, PM @ Lokal app
In the end, you’ll only get better at this process by handling multiple similar situations with more contextual insights. Since this process takes a while to see an outcome I will add more of my observations as I navigate this myself.
Resources shared with me
For Reading :
Toolkit to help with user research :
PS: Thankful to everyone who shared their experience with me. Most had a unified way of handling the process but also followed some unique approach based on the scale, stage and services of their company/startup.
PPS: Design twitter is bae.
