The best requirement is one a customer can challenge

Years later, a construction-tech customer taught me the same lesson in another way. Long written specifications were not helping the founder confirm what our team intended to build. I changed the format of the discussion: rough designs early, spoken feedback, recorded decisions and repeated visual confirmation. The first version of a sketch did not need to be beautiful. It needed to be easy to challenge.

Neither story argues against documentation. A team needs an agreed record of what it is building, why a change was made and what it will cost. But the format of that record must work for the people whose knowledge we need. A polished file that nobody can use to correct an assumption is not alignment.

I now ask 3 questions in discovery. Can the customer recognise their work in what we have captured? Can they tell us what is missing or wrong without learning our internal vocabulary? And can the delivery team trace that correction into a decision it can build and test?

This is why I value visual thinking in customer leadership. Not because I want every account to have prettier slides, but because shared understanding is easier to claim than to demonstrate. A requirement that someone can challenge is a requirement that has begun to earn trust.

Read related: When the document was not the right tool