There's an interesting discussion about personas at the On Product Management and Cranky Product Manager blogs. While I agree, personas should zoom into the important details, and ignore the fluff, I wonder how many development teams actually use personas at all when making design decisions.

That's not a knock on personas as a requirements tool. Quite the opposite: Know thy end user better than thyself should be the motto of product management. However, I'm not convinced that a lot of development teams have seen the value in this tool.

It's a hard cultural or mental change for some development teams to make, something I've witnessed first-hand. How many development teams have crossed this particular chasm? And are there tips of the trade about making this transition to be learned? I have no idea. (Potential research topic?)

A colleague, Ray Wang, has loads of fascinating statistics in his recent data overview, "The State Of Enterprise Software Adoption: 2007 To 2008." A staggering number of companies have developed and maintain custom applications.

Ray's piece is written for the market researcher, but like all good research, it has much broader implications. Perhaps you won't be surprised when I say, "Including product managers!"

The statistic says that a lot of demand exists that technology vendors are not meeting. Custom development is a last resort--and I should know, since I've done it myself.

Twice in my career, I've pushed to create custom requirements management (RM) applications. In the last case, I wrote it myself in PHP and MySQL. (Never fear, it's a laughably rudimentary application, functionality-wise, so the friend and colleague who inherited it wasn't left with an unmaintainable mess.)