From Feature Development to Customer Value Creation

Abstract

Marketing experts emphasize that the creation of superior customer value is a key element for companies' success. Understanding how to create value for customers, however, is not trivial in practice. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of requirements engineering (RE) in customer value creation. The paper describes experiences gained from six Finnish companies that develop software-intensive products and services for global markets. In practice, the focus of RE activities is mainly on product features. Customer value creation is, however, more than developing a competitive set of product features. It is important for companies to understand customers' processes and develop solutions that support these processes. To enable practitioners to change the focus from feature development to customer value creation, we propose a set of RE practices.