Today was our first official update to the research plan (a.k.a. the development document) for our project investigating thought leadership in the technology industry. A quick refresher: this particular piece of research is our first venture into Agile research development, which (1) applies Agile principles to our research, and (2) opens the project to the community to participate in the research process from start to finish. In other words, we're using the newly-launched Forrester Community as the forum where the voice of the customer will speak directly to us about our research as we're doing it.

You can see the current development document, including the updated text and the comments that inspired those changes, here. As promised, we're also maintaining a change log for tracking these changes over time. (The development document is also versioned, so we can look back on the history of edits through that mechanism, too.)

Today's a very exciting day for me. As you know, I'm a member of a team of Forrester analysts who write research specifically for product marketers and product managers in the tech industry. A few weeks ago, we launched a community for product marketers and product managers. Now, we're bringing those two activities together by including our PM community in every stage of a research project. Plus, we're using an Agile approach. And you're all invited.

(Role-based research. The voice of the customer, expressed loudly and regularly through social media. Agile as the vehicle for applying what customers say to the product we're developing, in the most rapid and substantive way possible. I guess we do read our own research.)

What's The Topic?
We've yet to meet a product marketer or product manager who isn't interested in thought leadership, given its attractiveness and elusiveness. Gaining recognition as a thought leader is only the first step. Having achieved that exalted status, how do vendors convert thought leadership into tangible business benefits?

For our first venture into this new research approach, thought leadership was an easy choice of topic: important, popular, practical, and manageable.

Where Does The Community Fit In?
The community has a bigger role to play in this project than just suggesting a topic. We need your suggestions and feedback throughout the entire research process, from inception to publication. For example, before doing the primary research, we'll draft a list of interview questions. Since thought leadership has no end of interesting aspects, we want to make sure that the questions we ask go straight to the issues that matter most to product marketers and product managers. Here are but a few examples:

[Another interesting finding about the requirements tool market, from research by Yours Truly and Mary Gerush. For other observations about this very interesting market, click here and here.] 

As organizations improve their requirements practices, and as the requirements tool vendors adapt in response, the front end of the requirements process is getting a disproportionate amount of attention. Many requirements defects start early, with the information that you feed into the requirements-generating machine. For example, if you don't have a clue how criminal investigators work, you're going to make basic mistakes in feature prioritization and design when you build a case management system for them. 

And it's not just the information that has fallen under suspicion. A lot of people are equally worried about the other raw material, ideas, that you feed into this machinery. Here are a few commonly cited concerns:

The just-published overview of the requirements tool market is, at bottom, a story of unrecognized success. The requirements tool market has grown rapidly along several measures, including the number of vendors, the scale of adoption, and (the primary focus of the overview) the number of business problems that these tools are designed to address. From a small niche in the software market, requirements tools have grown and evolved, sometimes merging with other applications, to the point where it's hard to talk about them as "requirements tools" in the strictest sense of the term.

When colleague Mary Gerush and I dove into the primary research, we were immediately struck by the number of vendors that have crowded into a space that, to be honest, was not too long ago treated as a bit obscure and unexciting. The longer we looked at the market, the more little vendors appeared in the landscape. We'd heard of long-standing specialty vendors like Ryma, Blueprint, and iRise, but names like TraceCloud and AcuNote were new to us. The big vendors, too, have seen opportunities in this space, sometimes buying (for example, IBM's acquisition of Telelogic), sometimes building (such as Microsoft's Sketchflow tool).

Something was happening in this market, and at least a piece of the explanation was clear from the moment we started talking to vendors and users. Very few of these applications were exactly like the first generation of requirements tools, such as MKS Integrity and Borland (now Micro Focus) Caliber, and most of the newer tools bore little resemblance to each other. Although they share the title "requirements tool," they don't deal with the same aspects of requirements.