Incorporating the voice of the customer into mass-market software product management

Mass-market software products, such as cloud or mobile services, target distributed and heterogeneous users with changing and evolving requirements. They impose several challenges on the software development process in terms of requirements elicitation and prioritization. Classical requirements engineering methods that rely on close interactions with users are difficult to apply for these mass-market scenarios. Therefore, new methods are required to assist product managers in designing their products while integrating the "voice of the customer". In this paper, we argue for using market research techniques in software product management to add user preference measurements, identify market segments and analyze users' willingness-to-pay. Following method engineering guidelines, we develop a method component1 that refines conjoint analysis (CA) for the use in software product management. We present the meta-model and procedure and demonstrate it in a study on secure cloud storage services. Our research extends existing studies that have applied CA by generalizing its application in the form of a method component that provides guidance for future studies.