Customer Validation of Requirements

 Validating the requirements and assumptions with customers are important.  However, we need to consider the follow situations:

1. Customer may not know what they need.

Customers may just want to get what the system can do and they don't have specific requirements.

Customers may not just buy a solution but want to buy the best practice. When they implement ERP in twenty or thirty years ago, they get the ERP and willing to change their business process according.  When they started BI/Analytics, they get the metrics as a library as they see this is what their competitors do.

2. They want everything you can offer

When you ask, do you need to have XX?  Can we just do YYY?  The XX is costly but YYY seems enough, do you agree?

If the person is not responsible for the cost but may be responsible for the lack of the feature, the answer will be yes as they can avoid the risk.

The bottomline is that product management makes the decision and be responsible, not customers.

As a vendor, we work with IT analyst from the client and describe the other factors as costs and availability of the feature when we validate with customers.