Speed Reading

Throughout the processes of gathering requirements for a product plan, developing market requirements documents, developing product specifications, managing to those specifications, testing, delivering and so on, it's hard to keep everyone together, especially when you're moving fast. Miscommunication--or lack of any communication at all--among the members of the marketing, engineering and executive departments regularly plagues the product development process. Consequently, time ticks by as people work through each misinterpretation and repercussion.

According to Watkins, there are now a number of vendors developing Web-centric solutions that facilitate the collaboration, communication, scheduling, tracking of delivery against responsibilities and status coordination associated with product development.

One such pioneering vendor is Austin, Texas-based productmarketing.com, which attempts to address some of these inefficiencies, inaccuracies and misunderstandings through its Web-based product development process tools, Accolades and Compass. Accolades creates a product marketing command center centralizing all marketing requirements data and serves as a collaborative platform for product teams to communicate and refine product features. Its new sister product, Compass, helps product managers identify, collect, manage and analyze market and customer needs from which to define product features.

"Our product is a puzzle tool for managing all of these different bits of information, putting them in chronologically so that you have an historical record of what decisions were made, when and why. It enables companies' product marketing teams to have greater real-time visibility to all of the information right at their fingertips," says Jay Pinkert, director of communications at productmarketing.com.

Without the kind of good processes these "puzzle tools" support, miscommunication seems inevitable given the jumble of issues and materials to be managed. "What happens in traditional product marketing loops is that you have a succession of meetings, spreadsheets and e-mails that become a tangle that becomes difficult to manage," adds Pinkert.

There's also the problem, says Russ Caccamisi, productmarketing.com's executive vice president, with getting all team members to sing from the same sheet of music. "It happens all of the time," he says. "You've got some group in the company that is out working on a piece of what this company is going to offer, but somebody's out working on old data."

Accolades and Compass facilitate collaboration, discussion, argument and ultimately, the decision and dissemination of the plan via the Web. "It's not to say that you can't have a misunderstanding, but it dramatically reduces the instance thereof," says Caccamisi.

And things speed up. The company reports that all of the time saved from not having to unravel bits of dislocated information has enabled some of its customers to reduce their time-to-market processes by one third or more.

These tools are particularly useful to companies with high turnover or when new members are added to a product team. "If you get a new engineer in, he can go back and look at the record of all of the collaboration that happened that allowed that decision to get made," says Caccamisi. "Not only does that speed things up, but it leaves people no rock to hide behind. No one can say that they weren't at the meeting."

As they are an ongoing record of the project, these tools not only assist with planning and communication, but they create an archive of product marketing decisions. In reverse, it's an audit trail through which the development team can get the full history of, say, a product feature. It's possible to see who made a specific recommendation, why and whether the requirements for it emerged from key customer requests or were perhaps the brainchild of someone no longer associated with the product.

Interestingly, some foresee bumps down the road from such audit trails. "That's something that really benefits the engineers," says Clark, who goes on to explain that when there are problems with a product's features, engineers often complain that marketing didn't adequately specify the product's requirements. "It's going to force product marketers to do a better job on their front in terms of market requirement specifics," he says....."