Buisness Requirements are Bull%^*#

This is an absolutely spot-on blogpost by Steve Yegge skewering traditional product development processes. It is highly entertaining, if a bit blue. Well worth a read for those of us challenged with bringing innovative products to market.

When big organizations sit down to design new products, they put in huge amounts of time obsessing about who the users are and how to meet those people’s needs. One common practice—strongly identified with Microsoft—is inventing some fictional “real people” who are going to be the users, giving them names and personalities and strengths and weaknesses, then reasoning about product features in terms of how these people will react to them and use them.

All of which mostly doesn’t work. Most successful innovative new products aren’t produced by large organizations, they’re cooked up by little startups or, if in a big company, by guerrilla groups in skunkworks mode.