Dismantling Requirement Hierarchies to Drive Product Success

Original

The root cause of chaotic requirement management in many enterprises lies in their failure to clarify the "hierarchy" of requirements. They either take vague strategic goals directly as R&D tasks or treat fragmented user feedback as core needs. For example, 'increasing the user retention rate by 30% within one year' is both a sufficiently clear goal and an equally vague requirement. It is clear enough for everyone to understand the direction, yet so vague that no one can immediately specify what functions can achieve this goal upon receiving the requirement.

To address this issue, we need to re-understand the multi-level nature of requirements and build a value transfer system of "business requirements—user requirements—R&D requirements." Dismantling the hierarchy of requirements: How can we enable precise value transfer to drive product success?

I. The Three-Layer Nature of Requirements: Focusing on Value Transfer

1. Business Requirements:

From a definitional perspective, business requirements are a concrete expression of strategy. They focus on strategic directions and business value, often with coarse granularity and relatively vague boundaries. For instance, "Invest 5 million yuan to develop a social software." As the source of requirement management, business requirements define the scope for subsequent requirement exploration—all requirements must ultimately serve the realization of business requirements. In ZenTao project management software, business requirements can be entered as the top-level goals of a project. For instance, when an enterprise confirms the business requirement of "launching a campus social app for young people within six months and capturing 20% of the campus social market share," this can be clearly recorded in ZenTao's project overview. Serving as the core guide for the entire project, it allows team members to check it at any time and carry out subsequent work based on this benchmark.

2. User Requirements

User requirements involve defining functions based on business requirements, clarifying a general scope with relatively finer granularity. Taking the aforementioned social software as an example, its user requirements may include a chat function, address book function, friend-finding function, and personal center, etc. The core of user requirements is to "adopt the user's perspective"—it is not about what the enterprise wants to give users, but what users truly need. Only by accurately capturing user requirements can business requirements have more specific functional directions, thereby avoiding the pitfall of "self-indulgence" in product development.

ZenTao effectively facilitates the collection, organization, and prioritization of user requirements. Enterprises can use ZenTao's requirement module to aggregate user requirements collected from various channels. As an example, user feedback for the campus social app such as "hoping for an anonymous chat function" and "needing a course schedule sharing section" can all be entered, with requirements classified and prioritized. This helps the team gain a clearer understanding of users' real demands.

3. R&D Requirements

R&D requirements translate user requirements into a language that R&D personnel can understand, answering the question of "how to do it." They have the finest granularity, with clear standards and acceptance criteria defined. In ZenTao, these R&D requirements can be broken down into specific R&D tasks, assigned to corresponding R&D personnel, and details such as task start and end times and responsible persons can be clarified, ensuring that R&D work proceeds in an orderly manner.

These three requirement levels do not exist in isolation but form an interlocking value chain. Business requirements provide directional guidance for user requirements, user requirements provide a functional basis for R&D requirements, and the implementation effect of R&D requirements in turn verifies the rationality of business requirements. A breakdown in any link will cause the entire requirement management system to collapse. ZenTao plays a pivotal role in connecting this chain: the setting of business requirements affects the direction of user requirement collection, the organization of user requirements determines the content of R&D requirement breakdown, and through ZenTao, the connections between the three can be clearly seen, facilitating the team to track the flow of the entire requirement chain.

II. The implementation of requirement management relies more on organizational structures and tools

Having the above processes and methodologies alone is not sufficient; the efficient operation of requirement management depends more on organizational transformation and tool-based solidification.

1. At the organizational level: Let professionals manage requirements

Establishing a cross-functional RMT (Requirement Management Team) is crucial. The RMT is usually composed of members from departments such as marketing, R&D, sales, and customer service. It is responsible for the full-process management of requirements and has clear decision-making power over requirement priorities, changes, etc. Why cross-functional? Because requirements involve multiple links: the marketing department understands trends, the R&D department knows technical feasibility, and the sales department is familiar with customer feedback. Only through collective decision-making can the one-sidedness of decisions be avoided. When using ZenTao for requirement management, the RMT can participate in requirement reviews and priority ranking through permission settings in the software. For example, the marketing department puts forward suggestions on requirement priorities from the perspective of market trends, and the R&D department expresses opinions on technical implementation difficulties. All opinions can be recorded and summarized in the requirement discussion area of ZenTao, ultimately forming scientific decisions.

2. At the tool level: Make Requirements Traceable and Auditable

Traditional requirement management relies on Excel spreadsheets, with manual filling and updating. This not only involves heavy workloads and high error rates but also makes it difficult to track the origin and evolution of requirements. Professional requirement management tools like ZenTao can solve these problems: they can establish connections between requirements and designs, tasks, test cases, code, and bugs, forming a requirement traceability matrix.

As an example, in ZenTao, clicking on a requirement allows users to view its corresponding R&D tasks and even trace which bugs were generated due to this requirement, enabling full life-cycle management of the requirement. Take the "course schedule sharing module" requirement for a campus social APP as an example. In ZenTao, this requirement is linked to the corresponding UI design drafts, front-end development tasks, and back-end development tasks. Bugs such as "delayed synchronization of course schedule information" identified by testers during the testing process are also associated with this requirement. After developers fix the bugs, the relevant records are updated synchronously, allowing team members to clearly see every detail of the requirement from its proposal to its implementation.

In this business era where speed determines success and requirements determine outcomes, a company’s competitiveness is no longer limited to technological breakthroughs or the abundance of resources, but more importantly, lies in an enterprise's sensitivity to and control over the market. To break free from passivity, requirement management is the next starting point. By reasonably decomposing requirement levels and leveraging professional tools like ZenTao, enterprises can make requirement management more efficient and accurate, thereby driving product success.