10:14 — Begin reading analyst report; think of a cool idea for the next release.
10:16 — IM client lights up. Sales engineer writes that we won a job because the Linux build of our last release was perfect. Pleasing news. Stop reading analyst report on page 3 and begin IM dialog.
10:16 — Phone rings, caller ID shows it’s a sales rep. Ignore phone, continue IM.
10:18 — Receive email from sales rep. His customer wants two enhancements next build.
10:21 — Receive automated email from customer service group with call reports on your product.
10:29 — Bug report arrives... on paper.
The workload of the typical software product manager has outstripped the ability of his tools to keep pace. Excel and Word are inadequate for the sheer quantity of data, and formatting regular product reports is tedious.
FeaturePlan gives product managers a central repository for the nine types of market input.
This list, incidentally, is based on the industry-standard Pragmatic Marketing® Framework™.
If you’re missing any of these, you don’t have a full picture of your market.
There are five ways to get this data into FeaturePlan.
Your view of the market is only as good as the inputs. That’s why FeaturePlan makes it easy for everyone to get fresh data into the system.
For example, it should be simple for your biggest customers to send product enhancement ideas to you, and simple for you to get them integrated with the rest of the market inputs. A customer can either use a web form on a private extranet page, or send you an email. In the latter case, the FeaturePlan Outlook plugin permits you to comment on the request and assign a priority to it.
In today’s environment, market requirements are always changing. FeaturePlan automates data collection for the product management team, and makes it easier for you to get a read on your market.
