Lean Requirements: What you Need to Know

Lean requirements are a go-to to accelerate software development by shortening the cycle time to gather requirements. They’re called Lean Requirements because they allow to invest the least amount of effort to generate the right amount of requirements at the right time. The lean approach is not just about capturing requirements; it’s also about having the right conversations among the right people to create an atmosphere of shared understanding. It’s only once we’ve reached this point that products can be created successfully.

Like Agile, Lean Requirements are more like a recipe than a prescriptive process — while certain steps are crucial to achieving the results you need, some ingredients can be added, substituted, or removed based on the situation. Each time we use Lean Requirements, the approach is tailored to the problems, constraints, and appetite of each individual client. To understand how this recipe works, we need to understand the processes that go into Lean Requirements.

The Process

“Start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Jim Collins

The process of gathering lean requirements has a number of advantages:

• makes the process much more precise
• helps the product team stay focused
• dependencies get fixed soon

What are some of the drawbacks you have to keep in mind?

• You’ll still have to perform high-level planning, create roadmaps
• even though lean requirements focus on the goals of a given short period, you still have to take long-term goals into account and sometimes either the vision gets affected as a result, or the notion of “lean” requirements themselves

Now, back to the process itself. Here are the steps to figuring out lean requirements:

1. Discuss high-level requirements
2. Prioritize the features and tasks
3. Choose an MVP
4. Prioritize the elements of the MVP so there are no interdependencies

This actually resembles the principles of Waterfall for 1–2 week periods

Now, going forward to the requirements, these steps have to be taken:

• Feature discussion- if the feature at question is a complex one, mockups are created
• Design creation, followed by its approval
• Creating user stories
• Groomings
• Approval process with the clients

Prioritizing features and tasks helps focus on what really matters and add new crucial increments one by one. If you haven’t already, give this approach a go, and see ow far it can drive your product.

About this author:

Armine Hakobyan is a digital storyteller with a heart for technology and innovation.

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