Treat requirements as guesses

Requirements arrive as facts. Someone wants a feature. A customer asks for a change. A stakeholder has a need. The team receives them and builds.

This is how products bloat. Not because people are lazy. Because requirements are treated as truth when they are actually untested hypotheses.

When you do not test the requirement, you do not know what problem it solves. You do not know if a simpler approach would work. You do not know if the real need is something else entirely. You just know someone asked for it.

I have watched teams build features no one uses. Not because the team executed poorly. Because no one questioned whether the requirement was solving the right problem. The feature worked as specified. It just did not matter.

This is not about bad intent. The person who handed over the requirement is solving from their picture. They see a gap and propose a solution. They do not have the full model to see whether that solution creates more problems than it solves. They are not hiding information. They lack the piece that would change the ask.

The failure is in passing it through. When the requirement arrives, the team has a choice. Build what was asked, or test the hypothesis behind it. Building is faster. Testing takes time. You have to ask why. You have to hold multiple possibilities. You have to think through consequences and trade-offs before you write the first line.

Most teams build. It feels productive. The backlog moves. The stakeholder is satisfied. But the product accumulates solutions to problems no one actually had. Each addition made sense in isolation. Together they create a system no one can explain.

The alternative is to treat requirements as guesses. Someone believes this feature will solve a problem. That belief might be right. It also might be wrong. The job is to find out before you build.

This takes time you do not feel like you have. It takes curiosity to ask why instead of executing. It takes courage to push back when the requirement looks reasonable. It takes enough understanding of the adjacent domain to see when a simpler path exists.

When I test the requirement, I am not questioning the person who asked. I am testing whether the hypothesis holds. Does this solve the real problem? Is there a simpler way? What are we missing? The conversation completes the picture between the person who sees the gap and the person who sees the constraint.

Sometimes the requirement is right. The feature is needed and the approach is sound. Building it is the correct call. Other times, the conversation reveals a different cut. A simpler solution. A reframe that eliminates the need entirely. You do not know until you test.

This is why I do not pass requirements through. Not because they are wrong. Because they are guesses dressed as facts. My job is to test them before they harden into cost. To ask the question that makes us reconsider. To hold the problem long enough to see what is essential and what is compensation for a shallow model.

The products that stay simple are not simple because they have fewer features. They are simple because someone tested the requirements and cut the ones that did not hold. You cannot cut what you do not test. And you cannot keep the product light if every guess becomes a feature.

Treat requirements as guesses. Test them. Cut the ones that do not hold.