Designing Software for Your Market

One thing that bothers me is the way that many IT shops go about desginin infrastructure or shared services. The scenario I often see is that rather than defining who/what/where the market is and providing a solution that addresses that need, the approach is more often "How can I convince those people to use what I have or want to build".

To me the difference is the lack of a product development team (in the marketing sense). Once that is in place then they must work in conjunction with engineering.

It seems that even Microsoft sees the need to improve this model within their own organization. In the course of developing the next release of Exchange, the two departments wrote a book together. Bink.nu: "It encompasses everything from the market outlook to the perceived value of possible features to potential customers. At its essence, the book serves as a contract between marketing and engineering, describing what goes in and what stays out of the software."

This seems like an approach that more should model.