Product Management and Software Development

I recently attended a training session on writing requirements that was geared for product managers. I sat in on the third day of a 3-day course. The day consisted mostly of how to create and prioritize requirements for feeding into development teams.

The instructor focused on the following aspects:

• Using market research to drive priority.
• Requirements should focus on a problem and not implementation.
• Requirements need to include personas, a problem, and a frequency that the problem occurs.

All of this was good information and made sense to me.

There was an undercurrent in many of the statements that seemed to reinforce an us-versus-them mentality between product managers and software developers. I think this undercurrent missed the mark and is probably doing more harm than good.

I have seen a lot of success over the last decade as a software developer at Clearent expressly because there has been a strong relationship between product management and software development. As the manager of a software team, I have pushed my team to learn and understand our industry along with our particular approach to doing business. I joke with my boss that members of my team spend more time learning the business than they do any of our technology. This learning has allowed my team to work as a partner with product management to creatively build tools and solutions that set us apart in the industry.

On the other side, product management has taken a LOT of time to provide context and education for my team so that they can get smarter about our business. All of our major development efforts start with several discussions about the business needs and the landscape of the problem we are trying to solve. My team is never in the dark about the motivations behind the changes we are making.

Together, we can have productive conversations about technical debt and business needs. The development team can raise concerns over technical debt. The product management team can talk to business needs that will help propel us forward. Because the dialog is good, we always find a good balance between the two concerns.

Healthy dialog between product management and development is the key to successful software development projects. This dialog exists in the close relationship we have at Clearent between product management and software development.

I hope it exists in your job too!