Datasheet

Based on your vision, the reader will conjure up ideas about what the product may do. It ’ s a good
start, but this vision, as stated, is much broader than your intent. Your idea involved fantasy
football, and the vision you ’ ve created could be interpreted much more broadly. Therefore, you
might rewrite the vision as follows:
Many websites are available for fantasy football leagues. They have great features
but lack powerful search capabilities. We will create a fantasy football search
engine so that fans have access to more data and can create the best teams.
This is better, as it constrains the problem to what you initially had in mind — fantasy football. It
also adds a purpose: creating the best teams. Now you need to scope the problem. You want to solve
the problem for fantasy football, but you also realize that the solution would work just as well with
other sports. So you can broaden the vision and then constrain it with the scope:
Many websites are available for fantasy sports leagues. They have great features
but lack powerful search capabilities. We will create a fantasy sports search
engine so that fans have access to more data and can create the best teams.
The immediate market for fantasy sports is 50 dedicated websites, reaching
over 3 million users. The indirect market, including news and sports sites, is
approximately 500 sites that reach over 20 million people.
The fi rst release will target American football and provide an interface for
existing websites. It will contain data for all NFL teams and will support
parametric searches on player characteristics. Subsequent releases will add more
sports leagues; will support features for managing teams, players, standings, and
trading; and will have an interface for mobile apps.
From this vision/scope, the reader will have an idea of the problem being solved, the benefi t of the
solution, and the iterative path for expanding the product over time. After this, you can defi ne a
business case, technical solution concept, and critical assumptions.
There are many examples of vision/scope documents online. They commonly have
sections for vision, requirements, solution, assumptions, limitations, and risks.
While Scrum doesn ’ t prescribe a vision/scope document prior to initiating a
project, it ’ s a best practice to create one in software project management as it
forces you to articulate the big picture.
Insight
It ’ s one thing to have a great vision; it ’ s quite another to turn that vision into a great product. This is
true of engineering in general and software engineering in particular. Product management has a broad
What Do You Need to Ship Software?
❘
3
CH001.indd 3CH001.indd 3 3/23/11 2:46:04 PM3/23/11 2:46:04 PM