Requirements Management 101: Your Step-by-Step Guide

It’s Friday night and you’re about to order pizza. You’ve got the phone in one hand and a list of requests from your friends in the other. But first, you need to sort through everyone’s preferences and decide what type of pizza to order. Pepperoni? Cheese? Vegetarian?

Ordering pizza is starting to feel eerily like managing requirements for your latest product launch. Just like the above situation, requirements management is all about listening to your stakeholders and understanding how to best cater to their needs. 

What is requirements management?

Requirements management is a way to ensure your final project deliverables meet customers’ and internal stakeholders’ needs. In this case, a requirement is something stakeholders need or want from your product. Stakeholders can be internal (like cross-functional partners) or external (like customers or clients). 

Requirements management is most often used by development teams working on software products and features, but can also be applied more generally to project management. For example, a requirement could be a feature that allows customers to successfully use your product, or an aspect of your product that will help cross-functional partners achieve their business goals. 

Before you start working on a product, you need to agree on the exact requirements so you can make sure you’re giving stakeholders what they need. Requirements management helps you document and prioritize requirements, keep track of changes, and stay aligned with stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle. It also helps you manage changing requirements and ensure your project stays within scope. 

What is a requirement? 

A requirement is a component you need to implement in order to complete a feature or product. In other words, it’s something your product needs to have or do to meet your stakeholders’ needs. Software products can have hundreds of requirements. But regardless of how many requirements your product has, all of them should be: 

• Necessary: You need this requirement in order to achieve your business or product goals. 

• Specific: The requirement is detailed and has a clear purpose. 

• Understandable: The requirement is clearly written and easy to comprehend. 

• Accurate: The requirement has enough accurate information about the challenge or need this requirement is addressing. That means instead of just describing what needs to be done, you should also clarify why the requirement is important. 

• Feasible: You should research the requirement to make sure you can implement it with your current tech stack and code infrastructure.

• Testable: You should be able to test the requirement through user testing, A/B testing, or another method. 

Here’s an example. Imagine you’re creating an app, and one of your requirements is that the entire app needs to be translated into English, Chinese, Japanese, and French—because those languages align with your main business markets.

• This requirement is necessary in order to launch your app in your company’s main markets and achieve business objectives. 

• It’s specific because you outline which languages you need and that the entire app needs to be translated. 

• It’s understandable because it doesn’t go into technical details—rather, it’s written in a way your team members and cross-functional stakeholders can understand. 

• It’s accurate because you’ve clearly outlined why the requirement is important—because English, Chinese, Japanese, and French align with your company’s primary markets. 

• It’s feasible because you’ve already built prototypes and test cases in other languages, so you know localization is possible and will perform as expected. 

• It’s testable because you have a system in place to test and confirm the accuracy of each translated version. 

Why is requirements management important? 

To create a great product, you need requirements management. Here’s why: 

• Ship the right features. The requirements management process helps define what your users need by understanding how they interact with the product. This helps you align your deliverables first and foremost with the essential needs of your customers. 

• Align with business goals. As you document and prioritize requirements, make sure each of them aligns with your overarching business goals. For example, a requirement to translate your app into 12 languages would support a business goal to expand into international markets. If a requirement doesn’t support business goals, that probably means you should invest resources elsewhere—or have a really good reason why the requirement is important. 

• Prevent scope creep. Defined requirements function as a project scope—they set boundaries and define exactly what goals and deliverables you’ll be working towards. Defining requirements in advance helps you identify potential roadblocks and push back when stakeholders try to add on additional requirements.

• Avoid roadblocks. Creating a product is complex—there’s software development, design, and testing—not to mention complex code stacks and engineering systems. Requirements management helps you plan how to develop a product within the constraints of your code stack and keep track of what you need to accomplish at every stage of the product development process.

Who is responsible for requirements management? 

The person responsible for requirements management depends on your individual project or team. That said, product owners or product managers typically manage requirements for development teams. These two roles are similar, except product owners are a standard role on Scrum teams while product managers are a more universal role—regardless of whether your team uses an Agile methodology. If you’re working on a more general project instead of developing a product, the project manager is responsible for requirements management. 

Requirements management requires cross-functional collaboration between your team and project stakeholders. You need to collect feedback from stakeholders, work with them to understand each requirement, and help your team plan how to address each need. That means the person who manages requirements for your project should have strong collaboration skills and excel at cross-functional communication, because they’ll be at the center of it all.

What are the different types of requirements? 

There are three main types of requirements: business requirements, user requirements, and systems requirements. It’s important to define the different types of requirements before work kicks off—because this often determines the stakeholders you need to collaborate with. 

Here’s an overview of the different types of requirements: 

Business requirements

Business requirements are the overarching business goals or metrics your product serves. They aren’t necessarily something the product needs to do, but rather things your business needs to do to satisfy both internal and external stakeholders. 

For example, imagine you work for an online retail business and your sales team uses a content management system to create and update product pages on your website. To accommodate growing inventory, your product team is building improved search functionality within your CMS. This project aligns with the following business requirement: Scale product inventory by 50% in Q1.

User requirements

User requirements define what users need from your product and how they’ll interact with it. They describe a pain point or an action the customer wants to accomplish, plus how the product should alleviate that pain point or help the customer achieve their desired action.  

Agile teams typically format user requirements as user stories, which are informal explanations of a software feature written from the perspective of an end user. User stories follow this format: “As a [persona], I want to [software goal], so that [result].” 

Let’s return to the CMS example we outlined above. Here’s an example user story written from the perspective of the end user—in this case, a sales associate who uses the CMS to perform their job duties. 

“As a sales associate, I want to easily search for and find specific product listings in our CMS so I can update and manage our growing online inventory.” 

Systems requirements

Systems requirements define what the product will do. Think of it this way—while user requirements outline the “why” and “what” of product features from a user’s perspective, systems requirements define the “how” of building that feature from the engineering team’s perspective. 

Systems requirements are often broken down into functional requirements and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements define what the product will do, while non-functional requirements define how well the product performs its functions. That means non-functional requirements typically have to do with security, performance, and reliability. 

For example, here’s how an engineering team might break down the above CMS user requirement into systems requirements: 

Functional requirements

• Each product listing stores the following information: product type, date created, author, URL, and publish status.

• New products can’t be created unless authors select a product type from a dropdown menu. 

• The search bar includes an option to apply the following additional filters: product type, date created, author, URL, and publish status. 

• Multiple filters can be selected at once. 

Non-functional requirements

• Search results are returned in less than five seconds. 

• Search results are 100% accurate. 

7 steps of the requirements management process

Requirements management doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. If you create a standardized process for your team, you can follow the same steps every time instead of worrying about which stakeholders to loop in when. 

To get you started, we’ve simplified the process into seven steps. Then, once you try things out and learn what works for your team, you can tailor your requirements management process accordingly. 

Step 1: Develop a requirements management plan

Start your project by creating a requirements management plan (RMP). This plan is your roadmap for handling requirements throughout the project lifecycle. In your RMP, define:

• Who will be involved in requirements gathering?

• How will you collect and document requirements?

• What is your process for tracking requirement changes?

• How will you ensure project success by aligning with goals?

A good RMP helps your project team stay organized and aligned throughout the development lifecycle.

Step 2: Elicitation and requirements definition

Elicitation involves gathering and defining your project requirements. It's an essential step where you connect with stakeholders and customers to understand their end-to-end needs.

Requirements elicitation

• Engage with stakeholders: Meet in person or communicate asynchronously with stakeholders. Introduce the product, feature, or initiative you're creating, and ask what they need to help customers or achieve their business goals.

• Gather end-user requirements: If possible, conduct user testing. At the very least, consult with your development team for insights.

• Manage expectations: Explain that not all requested requirements will necessarily be implemented. Clarify that this is an information-gathering stage.

Requirements definition

Defining your requirements helps outline all of the components your development team needs to accomplish in order to complete the initiative or product. 

• Write clear, specific requirements based on gathered information.

• Create use cases to show how users will interact with the final product.

• Ensure each requirement describes one specific need or feature.

You can also create user stories for each requirement in order to articulate what users need and how they’ll interact with your product or feature.

Then you can break down those user requirements into more specific system requirements. As you go, you may need to collect additional information from stakeholders to ensure you have enough context to complete each requirement.

Remember, at this stage of the requirements management workflow, you're collecting potential needs and requirements. Your team will prioritize and select the most important ones to pursue later in the requirements management process.

Step 3: Requirements analysis and validation

Now it’s time to sort through all of that feedback and decide which requirements align with your product and business goals. Ultimately, every requirement should contribute to an overarching business goal—like increasing revenue, expanding into new markets, or improving customer satisfaction. 

Requirements validation includes:

• Checking that all technical requirements are necessary, feasible, and don’t contradict each other.

• Confirming that technical requirements align with project goals.

Then, validate the requirements with stakeholders. This means checking that the requirements truly reflect the end-to-end needs of stakeholders.

Step 4: Establish requirements baseline

Once requirements are validated, establish a baseline. Documentation at this stage provides a snapshot of all approved requirements and offers:

• A starting point for your requirements management solution

• A reference for future decision making and measuring changes

There isn’t one set way to document and track requirements. Your product team may historically have used a software requirements specification (SRS), product requirements document (PRD), or requirements traceability matrix (RTM). 

But to ensure your team has real-time insight into all of your project requirements, try using a project management tool like Asana. That means no more outdated spreadsheets for auditing requirements—instead, both your team and stakeholders can see the most up-to-date descriptions of each requirement. You can also track the status of each requirement as you work on your project and even set up automations to alert stakeholders when progress is made.  

You can also integrate Asana with more specialized apps and requirements management tools like Jira and GitHub. This is especially useful if you work with stakeholders who don’t have permissions to access developer tools. 

Step 5: Prioritization and dependency mapping

Now that you have your set of requirements written down, work with your team to prioritize and plan how you’ll tackle them. This prioritization allows you to tackle the most important tasks first, especially if they’re blocking any other tasks down the line.

In this step, identify how requirements relate to each other. This process, often called traceability, involves:

• Linking related requirements

• Connecting requirements to other project elements like design documents and test cases

If your team uses Agile, add the requirements to your product backlog and then host a sprint planning session to decide which tasks to include in your next sprint. If you don’t work in sprints, that’s ok—you can create a project timeline to lay out when each requirement should be completed and whether there are any dependencies. 

Step 6: Change management, version control, and impact analysis

Requirements management isn’t just about planning requirements before your project kicks off—it’s also about navigating changing requirements during the course of your project. That means you should plan how to incorporate additional tasks that will impact your project scope. 

As your project progresses, requirements may change. Manage these changes by:

1. Setting up a process for submitting and reviewing change requests

2. Analyzing how each proposed change might affect other requirements and project elements

3. Updating your baseline if changes are approved

Use your dependency map to perform impact analysis. This helps you understand the full impact of changes before deciding to implement them.

Another option is to create a change control process. This provides a way for stakeholders to submit new requirements that will impact your project scope, plus it dictates who should approve or deny those requests.

A well-defined change management process helps you understand how to manage requirements effectively while keeping track of changes. 

Step 7: System verification and validation

In the final step, check that your finished product meets all technical requirements:

• Verification: Test each feature to ensure it works as specified in the requirements.

• Validation: Check with stakeholders that the product meets their needs and expectations.

This step helps you catch any issues before finalizing the product, which reduces the need for costly rework later.

Throughout this process, consider using a requirements management software like Asana. It can serve as a single source of truth, helping you manage requirements, track changes, and generate reports and dashboards for better project oversight.

Tools to streamline requirements management

Requirements management has a lot of moving parts, but it doesn’t have to feel out of control. With the right tools, you can set up a repeatable process that lays out exactly who to talk to, when to do it, and how to document and organize requirements throughout the project lifecycle. 

If you track requirements in Asana, you can create a standardized template to help you manage requirements for every project. That means instead of starting the process from scratch each time, you can reuse a predefined workflow—plus rest easy knowing that you’re not forgetting any critical pieces. 

FAQ: Requirements management

What is meant by requirement management? Requirements management is the process of defining, tracking, and controlling project requirements throughout the development lifecycle. It ensures that all stakeholders understand and agree on the project needs.

What is a requirements management plan? A requirements management plan outlines how requirements will be collected, tracked, and managed during a project. It serves as a guide for handling changes, documentation, and communication.

What are the key functions of the requirements management process? The key functions of the requirements management process include gathering requirements, analyzing and validating them, tracking changes, and ensuring that the final product meets the agreed-upon requirements.

What does a good requirement look like? A good requirement is clear, specific, and measurable. It should be easily understood, testable, and aligned with the project's overall goals.