How Use Cases can align the development teams and help reduce rework in product development

Product development starts with the whiteboard, where product manager puts his ideas together. I have not come across many product development and management teams which use use cases for communication with their development teams. Here is a brief on how I think use cases at the product management table, can help collect feedback from sales, marketing, customer support and help R&D team actually understand the common perspective of all other functions.

Use Cases at Product Management level
Product Managers can look at the product from 2 different perspectives, one is the user centric i.e. use case view and second is the non functional view of the product. We have seen many product specifications which talk about features all the time and miss on the Use Case view.
Use Case is a simple description of how a “user” will use the product in context. The more understanding the product manager has about the “users”, the more usability specific issues will come up in the use cases.

Lets look at an example, in Gmail there is a feature where you can look at all related conversations in one view, so each email with the same subject and its responses are clubbed together for the “user”. This allows user to see all emails for a specific conversation context in one place. If you would imagine a use cases for this it will describe the users behavior and how the software is supposed to interact with her. The use case will describe how easy it will be do this, will the user be able to click a small button on the right to be able to shift to subject view and so on. The idea is once the product manager describes this, the engineering team can take decisions based on this behavior, without there being a need to have a low level specification.

1. Developer has to understand the user and therefore is not into coding some feature but a behavior response for the user.
2. Developer can add any logic into the use cases and send it back and forth to product management, rather than putting this into some design documents which are not going to product management anyways.
3. When the product management comes up with a change, they can specify in the use cases, what and whys of change so developers start understanding the user more and hence while coding for other features, they start applying the same context.

This will mean better communication between product management and R&D which means lower rework, lower mismatch in expectations and ultimately a usable software, where developer is focussing on user needs rather than coding logic, every line of code has to make sense from use case perspective.

Use Cases are a great way to communicate with all stakeholders of the product, and can be converted into flash animations as well for communicating with reference clients, investors and management teams.