“Doing the Right Things” vs. “Doing Things Right” 7 ...

In 2014, we received a development assignment from our German headquarters: design an outdoor dual cable. On the surface it looked unremarkable, and its structure was not complicated. But we had no prior development experience with this type of product, and the customer's requirements ran on for several pages — so from day one the project was shrouded in uncertainty. This was a textbook "forward development" project. Forward development means the company had never made this kind of product before: there was no ready-made experience or existing drawings to fall back on, and everything had to be built from zero. At the same time, it can be viewed as a miniature forward-development case, because this small piece of cable carried some very special technical requirements. Faced with this challenge, we did not rush to the drawing board. We strictly followed the company's product development process and put the emphasis on requirements management, which we broke down into four progressive stages: first, deep collection and organization of the customer's original requirements, distilling core value from a noisy surface; second, mining and consolidating internal requirements, mobilizing the company's accumulated experience assets; third, a second round of requirements consolidation and architecture building during...