The Missing Piece of Software Development

Software product planning is the activity of selecting which product you should build. The subsequent activities of requirements specification, design and coding are primarily technical activities; software product planning requires the highest levels of understanding of both technology and business. Marketing and development typically take adversarial roles during product planning. Both parties lose if the product cannot be sold, and both parties lose when the product is delivered a year late. Complex relationships drive product planning such as customer demand, development cost, development risk, market size, competition, the time need to market the product, and price. Key to being successful at software product planning is having at our disposal the concept of a ?>level playing field?>. Each side needs to understand its own factors as well as the other side's factors, and will thus be able to understand the myriad implications of every decision.