Broad target audience, but of special interest to product managers/owners and the executive/managers who set their priorities.

Main points:

— in general, requirements from external customers or internal business units wrongly define problems and over-specify solutions.  Much of what we build is waste, since we build what customers DEMAND instead of what they NEED. Our customers are not experts in our systems.

— in commercial software companies, product managers spent a large part of their time validating problems and solutions with wide range of end users.  This is so we “build the right thing.” In corporate IT, product owners don’t usually have time or permission or skills or support to validate with large numbers of actual end users.  We get velocity but not value.

— “Agile/scrum” has been reduced to delivery without serious validation.  We should broaden our vocabulary and development approaches to include discovery/validation/customer development/Jobs To Be Done/design thinking/design sprints so that we build the right things — truly useful software.