4 From business goals to prioritized features

Before you can implement a software solution, and before you can even judge what features you should implement, you need to understand the problem you’re solving and how you can help. Who will be using the system, and what benefits will they expect from it? How will your system help users do their jobs or provide value to your stakeholders?

How can you know if a particular feature will really benefit the organization as you suppose it should? Are you building software that will have a measurable, positive impact for your client’s business? Will your project make a difference? Sometimes a particular feature, or even a particular application, shouldn’t be implemented because it will clearly not deliver the business benefits expected of it.

4.1 The Speculate Phase

4.1.1 Strategic Planning in a BDD project

4.1.2 Strategic planning is a continuous activity

4.1.3 Strategic planning involves both stakeholders and team members

4.1.4 Identifying hypotheses and assumptions rather than features

4.2 Describing business vision and goals

4.2.1 Vision, goals, capabilities and features

4.2.2 What do you want to achieve? Start with a vision

4.2.3 The vision statement

4.2.4 Using vision statement templates

4.2.5 How will it benefit the business? Identify the business goals

4.2.6 Writing good business goals

4.2.7 Show me the money—business goals and revenue

4.2.8 Popping the “why stack”: digging out the business goals

4.3 Impact Mapping

4.3.1 Identify the pain-point

4.3.2 Define the business goal

4.3.3 Who will benefit? Defining the actors

4.3.4 How should their behavior change? Defining the impacts

4.3.5 What should we do about it? Defining the deliverables

4.3.6 Reverse Impact Mapping

4.4 Pirate Canvases