With the customer in mind, what are the things of value — to the customer — that your product or services can offer? Write those down. Example: what are the things that the customer will gain by using your product or services; what are the pains that will be alleviated. According to Napoleon Bonaparte, a man is moved by either fear or self-interest. What moves your customer towards using your product or services? What is that Unique Value Proposition? That value is a customer-centric benefit from which you identify the feature or features — each feature has value — that will deliver directly or indirectly the benefit/value to the customer.
Next step: What are the ‘steps to value’? The activities that must happen leading to that value? Sketch / write those down — from start (the event that triggers the steps) to end (the achievement of the value).
‘Steps to value’ is also called a workflow.
From here, you do your analysis…do ‘Feature storming’ with collaborators. Have your collaborators put on the wall the features that they ‘see’/think that support the activities — write these down on small sticky notes… make it brief (intent only in few words)… skeleton features. This way, with post-it /sticky notes, we can easily collate these using affinity grouping technique, where similar features are put together.
A feature could directly impact a user or indirectly impact a user (an Enabler type of a feature).
A feature could represent a workflow. In this case, activities will be laid out; then for each activity, stories can be discovered. Otherwise, it is just a feature that is ready to be decomposed into stories. Do this process for a story as well — see figure below.
To be continued…
