Using Business Objectives to Design Better Products

When software products are late to launch, a practical solution is to drop features from a release while still delivering a product your customers will love. If part of your process is to tie business objectives to product features, you'll have at hand the information needed to decide how to proceed-as well as a guide to prioritize development efforts throughout the project. Joy Beatty explains how to elicit measurable business objectives from stakeholders. She demonstrates how to write statements that describe how a feature contributes to business objectives and ways to assign a business value to each feature. Armed with this data, stakeholders can compare features quantitatively, taking emotion out of scoping decisions. As a reminder of the techniques discussed, Joy shares a Business Objectives Model quick reference for you to take home and use in your requirements elicitation sessions.