Stevey's Blog Rants

Business Requirements are Bullshit

You can look at any phenomenally successful company, and it's pretty obvious that their success was founded on building on something they personally wanted. The extent that any company begins to deviate from this course is the extent to which their ship starts taking on water.

And the key leading indicator that they're getting ready to head off course? You guessed it: it's when they start talking about gathering business requirements.

Because, dude, face it: if it's something you want, then you already know what the requirements are. You don't need to "gather" them. You think about it all the time. You can list the requirements from memory. And usually it's pretty simple.

Done and get things smart:

You want someone who's superhumanly godlike. Someone who can teach you a bunch of stuff. Someone you admire and wish you could emulate, not someone who you think will admire and emulate you.

They're your seed engineers: the ones who will make or break your company with both their initial technical output and the engineering-culture decisions they put into place — decisions that will largely determine how the company works for the next twenty years.