“The Requirements Weren’t Clear”

Timeframes are rarely absolutes. Oh yes, there absolutely might be real deadlines, the kind that are actually important (“We’re releasing in time for the Christmas season, the company depends on it…”). That said, assuming that the deadline is actually achievable — and not something made up to get people to “work harder” — there is usually some level of uncertainty involved in the timeframes.

Take the chart below for example

People generally have a very good idea of how long it’ll take them to get Short Term stuff done. And Long Term stuff is usually beholden to the aforementioned deadlines, so there isn’t much uncertainty there (remember, if it’s a real deadline, the uncertainty is around what gets delivered, not when!).

The Stuff in Between, however, can be all over the place. It’s the domain of shuffled priorities, unexpected kinks, flu season, market-induced curve balls, and ambiguous requirements.

Yes. Ambiguous Requirements.

The thing is, when things go south, a very common straw that is grasped is that of Ambiguous Requirements. From an engineer’s perspective, it’s such an easy excuse, covering so many scenarios, that you’d be surprised if it wasn’tdeployed as the reason for delivery issues. After all, there are always things aren’t perfectly clear, external dependencies that aren’t completely deterministic, confusion between customer’s “wants” and “needs”. Heck, if there wasn’t some ambiguity in the requirements we’d all be shocked!

All that said, there are two points that need to be internalized

1. 1. Just because some requirements are ambiguous, doesn’t mean that allrequirements are ambiguous.
2. 2. The requirement that is ambiguous is probably not the long-pole.

Any Product Manager worth their salt knows, and keeps track of, the zone of ambiguity, and will shuffle things around to provide as much flexibility as possible in dealing with this uncertainty.

So yeah, the next time somebody throws “Ambiguous Requirements” as an excuse, look askance, especially if it’s the excuse for a major miss. It’s a clear sign that something else is busted in the process, and that, my friends, is something that you should be worried about!