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Steve Yegge usually rants about programming, not business. So nearly all of his excellent diatribes are off-topic for our marketing/business blog. This week, however is a business topic: Steve attacks “gathering business requirements.”

Yegge’s point — if a company needs research to determine what customers want, then the company is probably too far from the customer, and the software or product they produce will likely miss the mark.

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.

Steve Yegge: Business Requirements are Bullshit

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