Benefits/Features/Specs Benefits, Features, Specs Benefits, Features, Specifications (and Targets)

Benefits Customer Benefits come first What does the customer want/need? What would add value? Benefits generally come from your product opportunity research. You can’t just dump the list of needs generated last term – you need to begin to think about what can be delivered. Everything should be in the customer’s “voice” – direct quotes are great, though not required. Benefits/Features/Specs

Features Product Features provide Customer Benefits What cool things does our product do to provide these benefits? Note that features can’t appear out of nowhere; if you want a feature that has no benefit, go back and put in the benefit. As much as possible, features should still be in the customer’s language. Benefits/Features/Specs

Specifications Specifications specify Features How do we know we have actually implemented a feature? We need something measurable – that’s a specification. Different fields have different notions of “measurable” – key is to remove ambiguity. Product specs are high level, engineering specs will be more detailed. There is a whole process involved in cascading from the one to the other; we discuss it later. Once again, use the customer’s voice as much as possible. Benefits/Features/Specs

Targets Some Notes on Targets Targets can be hard to pin down. You’re never sure what can be done until you’re done. Thus, targets tend to evolve. Don’t worry at this stage about getting accurate numerical targets. Do make sure to put down some numerical target. Benefits/Features/Specs

Assignment Some Notes on the Assignment We expect you to be tempted to circumvent the nice linear benefit- feature-spec model. Don’t! The Bad Old Model is that Specs come from the Business Unit as a mandate. Our Better IPD Model means we expect some constructive conflict! The Examples in the following slides (see PDF file) are not all exemplary in content – they are offered to you as samples of different styles of presentation. Benefits/Features/Specs