requirements-elicitation_skill

Overview

This skill guides requirement elicitation from vague ideas to clear, testable specifications. It combines structured techniques—interviews, observation, root-cause analysis, and prototyping—to align stakeholders and reduce rework. Use it to produce user stories, acceptance criteria, and traceable requirements ready for implementation.

How this skill works

The skill inspects stakeholder inputs, current workflows, and high-level requests to extract real needs using techniques like the 5 Whys, concrete examples, and boundary identification. It converts findings into user stories with Given-When-Then acceptance criteria, documents non-functional requirements, and creates traceability artifacts (stakeholder maps, RACI, traceability matrix). It also provides validation steps—reviews, prototypes, and checklists—to get stakeholder sign-off before development.

When to use it

• Defining scope for new features or products
• Clarifying ambiguous or solution-oriented requests
• Resolving conflicting stakeholder priorities
• Creating user stories and acceptance criteria for engineering
• Validating requirements before development to reduce rework

Best practices

• Start with why: use the 5 Whys to find root needs, not proposed solutions
• Turn abstract statements into concrete, testable scenarios (performance, security, UX)
• Explicitly list in-scope, out-of-scope, and deferred items to avoid scope creep
• Include acceptance criteria for every user story using Given-When-Then
• Document stakeholders, RACI, and a traceability matrix to link requirements to business goals
• Validate with prototypes and a review checklist before implementation

Example use cases

• Interviewing product sponsor who asks for a "dashboard" to discover real monitoring and alerting needs
• Observing customer support workflows to identify manual pain points and integration opportunities
• Converting compliance and security goals into measurable NFRs (encryption, session timeout)
• Writing user stories and acceptance criteria for feature handoff to engineering
• Facilitating conflict resolution between marketing and engineering by proposing an MVP and phased plan