Jeff & Michelle

Michelle:

Since Michelle thought of the initial idea for the InStyle online fashion rental website, it would only be appropriate to use mind-mapping to elicit any of her ideas and formulate her initial brainstorming. Michelle does not have the means to furthermore develop the technical side of the website, but her creative thoughts are essentially going to fuel the entire project. Again, mind-mapping, a form of brainstorming, is a great way to get down as many of the requirements as possible. As a result, it is imperative that Michelle thinks of as many ideas (and branches of each idea) as possible in order for each future developer involved in the process to understand the path Michelle wants to go down. So, Michelle and her initial creative team sat down and brainstormed as many ideas as possible and recorded them in a mind-map using the online tool LucidChart. LucidChart seemed the most appropriate since it could be changed at any point and was a cloud server, so all documents were safely backed up.

Jeff:

Although Jeff does not have much of a presence in the early developmental process, he will most likely become a future investor or major impact later on during the actual production of the website. As a result, the requirement elicitation technique that would make the most practical sense would be interviewing. The interview would be held in the morning for 45 minutes to an hour (depending on how in depth his answers are) and will mostly cover where Jeff thinks the website will go. Essentially, Jeff’s thoughts about the production of the website are incredibly valuable from an investment standpoint, as he has a lot of experience with entrepreneurship and has great insight into that field. His answers would be incredibly helpful to Michelle and help her understand stakeholder requirements that involve the future of the website. Therefore, possible interview questions to ask Jeff:


 * 1) If this had been your idea, what initial step would you advise Michelle to take before releasing her website in terms of future investors and developers?
 * 2) Is this a type of website that you would be interested in investing in sometime in the future after it is produced and released to the public? If not, what changes would you want to see in order to make it a suitable company for your investments?
 * 3) Do you think Michelle should outsource more aspects of the company or do you recommend she does the majority of the work? If so, which aspects would you outsource if you had the choice?
 * 4) What steps do you think need to be made to ensure that InStyle is better for customers than various competitors? SHould Michelle offer incentives to customers, free trials, free shipping on purchases over a certain total? What do you think would be the best to gain that initial customer base?
 * 5) Based on previous experience, what would your top one or two requirements from an investor/entrepreneurial standpoint be for this website to be successful?