Broadening the Lens: Toward the Collective Empathic Understanding of Product Requirements

摘要

Many software product companies have embraced the agile paradigm and gone on to create cross-functional product development teams that fully own their product. The expectations of these teams are very different than of development teams in a disciplined software development environment. The study underway examines how these empowered cross-functional product teams, as a collective, create and nurture a shared mental model that accurately represents the external product domain and its realities and that provides the context for understanding the requirements. We also examine external factors that allow for these teams to develop these capabilities while less-empowered teams cannot. Using Constructivist Grounded Theory, we study individuals and teams in several companies and varied product domains. We find that certain organisational factors play a significant role and we also examine an essential dynamic of broadening the lens and blurring boundaries that cross-functional product teams employ in order to not only fully embrace product planning but also to grok the domain for their products.