1. Vaibhav Shrivastava
vaibhav.iitroorkee@gmail.com
15 March 2016
Vision Broadening
Business analysis for Product Management to Product
Ecosystem Management
Abstract
Brainstorming, Focus group discussion, observation and many other traditional and
quite widely used requirement gathering techniques are still the basis of how a business users’
requirement is transformed into something (read, BRDs FSDs DFDs etc) which can be
translated by Product teams into what we call as a final product. All this would have been very
much perfect only if everything remained superbly unperturbed and consistent throughout
the process - from users’ requirement to the supporting technologies. But unfortunately that is
not the case.
BAs need to hat the Product manager’s role and vice versa, in order to bring about a
vision driven approach in the style of work. I shall try to illustrate how this could be done (by
example) and what results could it lead to (by case-study).
Another huge impact that the ever evolving technology bring to the fore is a constant
need to innovate. While though this may look like a need to maintain the Product Life Cycle
in order to avoid obsolescence, it actually is a mandate to stay relevant and accommodate the
impact of end-user behaviour onto the said (and unsaid) user requirements. Final goal is to
get the users say, “This is exactly what I asked for. In fact, you got it better!”
Classic example have been evolution of products like ‘Facebook’, ‘IBM Cloud’ and even
‘Google’. Imagine if creating google (the first product) was a project given to you by Bill and
Larry, what would you have asked and done? And would that be enough? Think of the
answers and you would know that they weren’t believing in ‘Product management’; but in
‘Product Ecosystem Management’, which changed the entire game. (This is going to be an
interactive and participative short case-study I shall run the audience through)
My Method: Present concept, Demonstrate via case study, explain methodology and
results; finally conclusion in form of how to go about it to implement it as ‘Do-It-Yourself’.
VISION BROADENING !1