Blurring boundaries: Towards the collective team grokking of product requirements

Abstract

Software development has become increasingly software ‘product’ development, without an authoritative ‘customer’ stakeholder that many requirements engineering processes assume exists in some form. Many progressive software product companies today are empowering cross-functional product teams to ‘own’ their product – to collectively understand the product context, the true product needs, and manage its on-going evolution – rather than develop to a provided specification. Some teams do this better than others and neither established requirements elicitation and validation processes nor conventional team leadership practices explain the reasons for these observable differences. This research examines cross-functional product teams and identifies factors that support or inhibit the team’s ability to collectively create and nurture a shared mental model that accurately represents the external product domain and its realities. The research also examines how teams use that collective understanding to shape development plans, internal and external communications, new team member onboarding, etc. We are engaged with several software product companies using a constructivist Grounded Theory method towards the research question. Early results are emerging as organisational factors, within and surrounding the teams. One emerging observation relates to the degree to which functional distinctions are treated as demarcations or blurred boundaries. The other observation is the impact an expectation of mobility has on an individual’s sense of feeling part of the collective team versus solely being a functional expert. This also becomes a factor in the first observation. The research is in-progress but early observations are consistent with a basic element of empathy that a certain blurring of the boundaries is necessary for a period of time in order to better understand the other context. Future research will examine whether the observed organisational factors are pre-conditions for the team being able to collectively understand the context of the product requirements, collectively and deeply.