How to build product: Let’s start with the business

Agile development works very well in product development area. But to buildsuccessfull product is much more work than just gather requirements and implement them. One of the most tricky thing in agile development is how to prepare requirements which are ready for incremental development while still delivering some value for the customers. Businesses need to constantly deliver new functionality to survive. Customers want new functionality or fix defects (at least). But continuous development can mean waste as well, continuous rework.

In this series of articles, we are going to guide product owners how to prepare product backlog appropriately.

Let start with Cute.CRM — customers relations management application example in which we want to explain how to write such user story correctly and to describe thinking process

Business model with Lean Canvas

The most of the product owners start to write requirements immediately. This is however not correct.

Before we will do so, business model should be described so as the Product owner I understand who is my customer and her problems. We are going to fill up some parts of the Lean Canvas which are important for our requirements.

• Customer segments — for who we are going to prepare the product, who is going to buy it, who is preferred as user of it
• Problem — description of 3–5 top problems our customers face.
• Solution — what will the product be, what be included in the product
• Uniqueness — what makes your product different comparing to the competition.

So let say that our example’s lean canvas would look like this one (not all information are necessary for purposes of example so they are empty):

Elevator Statement

To simplify the canvas let’s write down elevator statement so we can have a crisp description for anybody who is interested in.

For small, local market, shops who are a place for shopping with a close buyers-seller relationship

the product Cute.CRM is customers management relationship application which helps keep an evidence of sale

and comparing to XYZ helps shops to target theirs offering the way customers feel like VIP.

The Value Proposition Canvas

Now we targeted our application for small companies selling some goods on the local market. But who is such company? What is its job, what kind of pains they have? What are they looking for?

We need to understand that before we will identify requirements, so we can target the customer much better. We are going to use Value Proposition Canvas for that.

As we know more about our customer, let’s identify what our product should offer to her. We will fill up the left part of the value proposition canvas — gain creators and pain relievers.

Product Backlog

Once we identified product requirements, we can start to build up our product backlog. We will start with three main application areas which in agile are called epics:

1. Customers epic will be focused on functionality describing a customer, her needs & preferences, etc.
2. Products epic describes offered products that small local shop sells
3. Sales epic will provide functionality necessary to keep the track about sales, its measurements etc.

To evidence epics, we are going to use Start! ProductDesk which offers story map view where we will be able to track hierarchy of the requirements. We colorized cards to distinguish application’s parts. Learn more how to use Start! story map.

Breakdown of epics

As product owner, I should break down epics now into more detailed features that combine customer’s jobs, pains and business value together. We broke down epics into features that group user stories (business requirements).

As we apply principle As late as possible, we wrote just titles for the requirements. The reason is simple. Requirements might change or even they can be removed from our product over time so we do not want to spend life on details right now.

Conclusion

We started to build the new product Cute.CRM with an understanding of the business, potential customers and our uniqueness with help of Lean Canvas. Based on that we synthesized Elevator statement which provides a crisp description of our business. We continued further with the description of customer’s jobs, pains, and gains with help of Value Proposition Canvas. Only after that, we identified requirements which were later broken down into epics, features and user stories.

We are going to continue with user stories writing. All written user stories will be built upon all mentioned assets and they are going to be validated by all of the assets.

The article has been originally published on https://www.scrumdesk.com.