The compass that changed everything
[Part 2 of 6] How I stopped guessing which requirements were real.
Before I built the Requirements Compass, I used to rely on instinct.
You know the drill: read the brief, ask a few questions, mentally stack what feels solid vs. what feels made up.
Then try to push back without making anyone uncomfortable.
It works.
Until it doesn’t.
Until you realize your gut is right, but no one else sees what you see.
And suddenly you’re negotiating timelines for a feature no one has proven is even necessary.
I got tired of gut feel being my only filter.
So I made something visual.
Something simple enough to sketch in a meeting.
Something that makes the difference between a real problem and a false assumption impossible to ignore.
I called it the Requirements Compass.
Here’s how it works:
You take every requirement—every idea, request, complaint, or “must-have”—and map it across two dimensions in a workshop with your key stakeholders:
What type of thing is this?
A real problem?
A proposed solution?
A want or a wish?
A perceived constraint?
What’s the strength of evidence behind it?
Have we directly observed it?
Or are we going on someone’s gut?
Or worse… a really confident guess from three years ago?
You map those two things and slowly but surely, the fog lifts.
You see what’s solid.
What’s risky.
What’s complete fiction.
You start spotting the real “North Star” problems, the ones that matter, and the ones we can prove.
And when someone asks, “Why aren’t we prioritizing that feature?”
You have the map in front of you.
Not just your gut.
The Compass doesn’t give you the answer.
It gives you a better fight.
It gives your team something to point to when hard calls come up.
It creates just enough friction to stop the auto-pilot delivery of things that haven’t been validated.
In tomorrow’s note, I’ll walk you through a story where this kind of thinking saved three months of development work. And, more importantly, exposed how a false assumption almost sent a team down the wrong path entirely.
Until next time,
Pragati
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