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The other week I came across a four letter acronym, which got me perplexed for a moment – OOTB. In situations like this, my instinct is to ask the almighty and omniscient Wikipedia for the correct interpretation. The on-line oracle gave me two options: “Out of the box” or “Out of the blue”. Interestingly, both were relevant to the context at hand, which I thought was quite funny.
I was working on requirements for “out of the box” integrations for our CDC Software product lines, and as always there is a challenge to deal with priorities. Different people will have different opinions but it is ultimately Product Management’s responsibility to determine which requirements represent the largest business opportunity and benefit to the customer. Requests will come in “out of the blue” sometimes, which is OK, as long as we take a step back and do the analysis before committing resources and energy. Doing the wrong thing would mean that we find ourselves out of resources to do the right thing.
Luckily, in my list of important requirements for our product integrations I have used the term “pre-packaged” instead of OOTB. In previous blog posts I have described the first two in a list that looks like this:
- Reliable and resilient
- Business content-aware
- Pre-packaged
- Loosely coupled
- Standards-based
The benefits of pre-packaged integration should be easy to understand. The customer simply does not need to build the integration from scratch, carrying costs for development, quality assurance, and worse – maintenance and upgrades. This is where the financial equation of software gets really ugly, see my colleague Mats’ excellent post on the topic.
There is a catch here. All those benefits are good stuff – if the requirement is valid. If no one really needed it, we wasted our time and we missed the opportunity to spend our resources on software that actually makes a difference to the customer. No one is served by “out of the box” integrations if the requirements came “out of the blue” – and there was nothing behind it.
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It is a product management nightmare when the requirements out of the blue. To enhance out-of-the-box value customer requirements needs development and validation. A Life Science company hired me to help them structure their requirement list. After fifteen minutes discussion I was able to throw the list away. All requirements came from individuals that didn’t affect buying decisions.
Noone had put any demands on the demands.
A product manager must always work on validating out-of the blue requirements. Sales and your management are experts in providing you with these reqs.
Thank you for your insight. Apparently, I am not the only one having to deal with OOTB requirements