The requirements-list trap.

A buyer goes quiet for a week, then sends a document. Forty requirements, numbered, some with sub-points. Your first feeling is relief, maybe even a little pride. They are taking it seriously. This is the deal getting real.

It is the moment you can lose without ever seeing what killed it.

A list that long is not a specification. It is a buyer who has not decided what they want, handing you the deciding and calling it a brief. Every line reads as “we need,” but what most of them mean is “we might need, and we would rather you carry the risk of guessing than carry it ourselves.” The moment you say yes to the list as written, you have agreed to be measured on how many boxes you tick, not on whether anything got better. You stopped being a vendor. You became their internal IT department, unpaid, and grateful for the work.

And the price follows the role. A vendor who owns an outcome can charge for the outcome. A team that builds to a checklist gets paid like a checklist: by the item, down to the item, argued down at every item. You will spend two quarters shipping forty things beautifully into a company that still cannot tell you which one it needed, because it never decided.

Here is the part that should take the weight off, because it is not your failing. You are not behind on features. The buyer is behind on a decision.

I have written a list like that myself. Forty lines, numbered, sub-points. Just one sentence I did not want to say out loud: I had not decided what exactly the thing was for.

The list is not proof your product is missing things; it is proof that nobody on their side has been willing to say out loud what this is really for. That is not a gap you close by building. It is a gap you close by asking.

So do the braver, smaller thing. Name the one job your product exists to do, in a sentence a tired person could repeat. Put the price on that job and its outcome, not on the list. Then take the forty lines back to the buyer and sort them, in front of them, into the few that serve that job and the many that are someone’s wish, a leftover from a vendor who once burned them, or a box copied from a template nobody remembers filling in. You will learn more about whether this deal is real in that one sorting conversation than in a year of building.

Before you take this too far: some of those lines are real walls, not wishes. In pharma, in finance, in anything a regulator can close you down over, a requirement is a requirement, and “let’s simplify” is how you lose the account and maybe someone’s license with it. Fine. Anchor even those to the one named job, so the wall is one you chose to stand behind, not just the longest item on a list you never questioned.

The trap is not having requirements. The trap is letting the list decide what you are.