Whether you are responsible for managing a single product, a product family or perhaps a portfolio of diverse products, your overriding goal is to drive product direction based on factors like corporate strategy, the voice of the customer, emerging technologies, prevailing trends and competitive influences. With so much to consider, gathering ideas, requirements, and feature requests and deciding which should be included in your product roadmap is a critical success factor for your company. This paper explains how Telelogic Focal Point™ can play a pivotal role in the future success of your development efforts by improving collaboration within your internal organization and to other stake-holders, such as your customers and vendors.

With Focal Point, you capture, collaborate, select and manage the product ideas, features and requirements, which increase visibility, understanding and traceability throughout your product development lifecycle. Further, Focal Point promotes value-based decision-making, enabling you to pursue ideas which increase revenue, improvements in quality and productivity, and lower risk, while maximizing value to the customer. Simply put, Focal Point helps you deliver the right products to the right market at the right time.

As illustrated in the diagram below, Focal Point can be used to address any of the elements of product development individually, or it can be applied across the entire spectrum allowing you to ultimately link your strategic product planning processes with the tactical product delivery processes.

Capturing Information
A big step in successfully capturing and managing information on ideas, requirements and feature requests is to reduce the number of information sources and formats. Ideas, requirements and feature requests typically come from a variety of sources, usually in a variety of formats, such as spreadsheets, documents, emails, phone calls and meeting notes. How then, do you ensure that you and your stakeholders have an up-to-date, consistent view of what is needed and what you plan to deliver? With Focal Point, you replace chaos with order.