Pete Indelicato from the iRise Product Definition team presented on the Product Roadmap, how iRise makes decisions about the roadmap and how iRise is used. In addition, he provided a glimpse of coming features for the next two releases which will not be disclosed in this blog post.

Pete reiterated that iRise’s overarching goal is to help our customers build the right thing vs. helping them build the thing right. This is an important distinction as iRise feels that we are the only vendor in our space focused on helping customers build the right thing.

iRise products are built using the following 4 pillars:

• fastest and easiest modeling
• best review cycle facilitation (as easy as possible to share, gather feedback and iterate)
• best definition deliverable (to communicate downstream)
• team-based solutions (build a platform that meets needs of large organizations)

iRise’s Product Definition (PD) team conducts extensive needs findings to help plan future releases. A combination of the following approaches are used: conduct customer needs analysis campaign – observe users on-site, review “pulse” from the field on a quarterly basis, and explore other community sites including the UPA, Product Management Institute, IIBA, Catalyze (of course) and others. Product Definition also gets a deluge of daily feedback from ad hoc conversations, phone calls and emails to feedback@irise.com. In addition, PD is constantly experimenting with potential new features using iRise.

Pete also shared some of the best practices used by iRise’s PD group. These practices include: personas, scenarios, paired design, manufacturing in mind, usability testing, simulation UAT, manager and living specs. iRise simulations are always the center of communication.