Trigent Insights newsletter - Managing Product Development Budgets

Each month Product Managers, CTOs and CFOs sit together and confront a major challenge - how to integrate the endless list of MRDs (Marketing Requirements Documents) into a product within a defined release cycle and tight budget.

The challenges are many. Requirements from Sales and Marketing are sometimes applicable to the product and sometimes not. Some requirements involve simple fixes; however, others necessitate architectural and design changes and many simply entail plain grunt work.

Converting each requirement into a SFS and SRS takes time and effort that can interfere with planned release dates. Prioritization of requirements by understanding the revenue impact is perhaps easy compared to deciding which requirements to sacrifice in the face of tight resources, budgets and time.

For example, customers always need more features but due to a shortage of time, money and resources, it is difficult to accommodate these features into the release cycle, let alone prepare specifications, design, code, and test them fast enough.

However, companies can integrate the MRDs into their deadlines while still producing an excellent product with relative ease by leveraging a cost effective outsourced team. They should begin by outsourcing the easier tasks first. To identify these tasks, they should separate the MRDs into two buckets, Bucket 1 and Bucket 2.

Bucket 1	Bucket 2
This bucket contains the work that requires little in terms of design change but more grunt work – for instance, reporting modules, long pending minor bugs and fixes, and less intense UI changes that have major customer impact.	This bucket contains the work that requires design and architectural changes and that necessitates deep domain and user experience knowledge. These are the changes that impact vast areas of code within the application.

Outsource the tasks in Bucket 1 to a trusted outsourced vendor. Choosing an offshore vendor will help in leveraging costs and time zone differences. A vendor with experience handling software products similar to yours will also ensure the reception of excellent outsourced support.

Follow best practices in setting up the offshore environment and knowledge transfer to the offshore team. As the company becomes comfortable with their outsourced partner, they can test outsourcing complex tasks from Bucket 2. You will find that over a few release cycles, you can actually see more complex work getting done faster.

Two critical factors can help in leveraging your offshore team to handle new requirement requests:

Train your outsourced team to quickly develop software requirements from each marketing requirement or enhancement request
Manage your QA and testing effort by better test automation

We will explore these two challenges further in a future issue.

Managing an outsourced offshore relationship well can yield quick results and make pending MRD lists smaller and more manageable. In addition, CFOs and customers will be pleased with a more substantial and full-featured product.