I have been reading the book title "Outside-in Software Development - A Practical Approach to Building Successful Stakeholder-based Products" as part of my MBA course work. I'll try to post few blog post outlining few important points discussed in the book. The authors primarily show how to identify the stakeholders who will determine a product's real value, shape decisions around their needs and enable teams to deliver software that achieves broad, rapid and enthusiastic adaptions. It is an on-going challenge for software development teams to build softwares that "delights" their customers. Challenges arise from the fact that precisely how one supposed to do this too this that is often left to conscientiousness and integrity. The book provides a clear framework that any development team can quickly benefit from, regardless of project scope or type.

Chapter 2, "Understanding Your Stakeholders", outlines different categories of stakeholders and describe how each one affect various aspect of products being built. Their a four distinct steps in a stakeholder analysis

• Identify the stakeholders
• Understand their needs
• Communication with stakeholders
• Align stakeholder goals with development ativities

Stakeholders are defined by people for whom you develop a software product; they affect and are affected by the products. There are five categories of stakeholders are indicated in this book

Principals: They have the authority to acquire and deploy the software product and are usually the one who have championed the need for the specific product. Their thinking is mostly focused on business value. We often call these stakeholders as "clients"

End-users: These are people who will interact with the software product. Their experience with the product will have a significant effect on the ultimate success. These end-users may take variety of roles when interacting with software product. They may be knowledge workers, system administrators, business partners or even internal staff engaged in support activities

Partners: They will make your product work in real life, such as operations teams, business partners and system integrators. In my opinion, hosting providers fall neatly into this category. They have an integral role to play to make a product "consumable" (more on this in a later blog post)

Insiders: People within the organization, such as developers, support engineers and sales, architecture and marketing teams.

I'll continue this discussion of stakeholder identification in my next post that will include "Stakeholder Goal Map", relationship between stakeholders and alignment of stakeholders' goals with product development.

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