Earlier this month, the Silicon Valley Product Management Association kindly invited me to participate in a panel discussion about the state of PM as a profession. Since the role has wide responsibilities, the conversation ranged widely, but we did dwell a great deal on requirements. One participant asked, "If you could pick only one source of information for requirements, what would it be?" My response was a little tart: I hate that question, because there's no way to answer it.

First, no single type of information will be sufficient to answer a substantive question. Requirements are an exercise in triangulation. Is it worth pursuing a project? You could count the number of people who have asked for it, but that's hardly a reliable basis for making a potentially expensive investment. The next logical questions -- Why do they want it? How important is it? Do we really understand the request? -- require a conversation with at least a couple of potential consumers of this technology.

Second, the question determines the type of information needed to answer it. One type of market development question, such as, is there opportunity for us? requires market-level data. A different market development question, do people in this market need a different mix of functionality in our product? leads to an investigation of potential use cases.

The people responsible for requirements -- product managers, in the tech industry -- have no training in selecting the questions to ask, or the right way to ask them. Which is odd, because you might define the PM role as the questions person, delving into markets, users, competitors, stakeholders, business problems, and a towering pile of other topics.

Undoubtedly, when you read the title of this blog post, you thought, "But politicians are users." No, I'm not talking about that kind of user. Instead, I'm thinking of the user we normally discuss around these parts, the kind of person whom product managers and product marketers try to understand, but often don't. 

The 10Questions Project posed questions from salt-of-the-earth, ordinary folk to California senatorial candidates Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer. It's a noble failure, a change of medium that had no discernible effect on the quality of message. The candidates' answers are exactly the sort of vague, high-level statements that are more about sentiment (what candidates hint they might do) than policy (what they'd actually do).

These frustrating YouTube snippets resemble the kind of bad answers that users often give when PMs ask them questions like, "So, what would you like to see in the next release?" The reasons for the uselessness of the answers are the same, too:

• The questions.
• The channel through which they're answered.
• The lack of follow-up.

For those of you who have been following our thought leadership research project, we're now in the final stages of this project. I've posted the proposed outline here for your comments. If you're not familiar with this project, here's the development document that summarizes the topic, working hypothesis, and research method. Also worth reading is this blog post, which explains why we're using this piece of research to pilot an Agile, community-based approach.

Realistically, comments will have an impact on the final document if you post them by the end of the week. After that, I'll be writing the actual document.

Also worth mention: in drafting the outline, I realized that some of our earlier work on B2B evaluation, selection, and adoption is applicable here. Expect to see a cameo appearance from some of that interesting research in this document.

When it comes to home improvement, I'm barely competent. My biggest hurdle is ignorance: when I was growing up, no one in our family was a do-it-yourselfer. Unless I had the opportunity to watch the handyman, electrician, or plumber fixing a problem, and that person was patient enough to let me observe, I had zero experience with these tasks.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago, when I signed up for installing hardwood floors in our home. Friends had said that it wasn't as hard as it looked, and the staggering quotes from contractors provided the incentive for forging ahead, despite my ignorance.

After buying the tools and digesting the instructions, I started on the first room. My first attempt was a hilarious escapade, which resembled a horizontal variant of Jenga more than anything that you could describe as "home improvement." After taking a break for a few days, I figured out where the project had gone wrong, made adjustments, and finished the room.