Today marks the end of my first week at a new job. After seven years I’ve left NetIQ to join Accept Software, a startup building something near and dear to my heart — tools for product managers. When Accept’s CEO James Davies came to NetIQ to demo Accept 360 in February ‘05, I commented to one of my colleagues “I’d love to be the product manager for that product!” And now I am.
I’ve been a proponent of PM tools for a long time, but until recently the tools have been out of reach or inappropriate — expensive, clunky, and focused toward engineering rather than product management. And since I consider the PM to be the “CEO of the product,” that’s a problem.
Requirements management is incredibly valuable – having a central repository that all stakeholders can access, and that tracks not only the requirements but the discussions and decisions related to the requirements. What’s great about Accept 360 is that it also brings product planning and analysis to the table. This capability is extremely important to companies like NetIQ which not only have complex products with lots of options for how releases are structured, plus a lot of products in their portfolios. The value of requirements management is, in some sense, obvious, but the product planning capabilities, especially if well integrated with the requirements side, is perhaps more valuable. It’s the difference between making sure you’re building the right thing versus making sure you’re building it right. Both are important, but without the former, the best job possible on the latter has a lower probabilty of success.
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