Making Sense of Product Requirements

This paper takes a historical perspective to more than 40 years of software development within a company that is delivering its products to a diverse set of customers throughout the world. By examining the company's past, we wish to find origins and potential remedies for the challenges that many companies presently face in determining just which, of many, features shall be implemented to forthcoming versions of their software products. We have concluded that the product-related design problems that once were manageable with rational thinking have gradually evolved into problems that have multiple and conflicting interpretations, different value orientations, unclear goals, contradictions and paradoxes. These problems occur due to the demands imposed by larger and much more diverse sets of critical stakeholders drawn from the new global business environment with its multi-cultural needs and greater numbers of highly domain-skilled, computer naïve users. For such problems sense making rather than decision making has begun to be the central organizational issue.