Before Requirements: How to Decide Whether a Feature Is Worth Building

Business stakeholders often come to analysts with a ready-made solution. thisanalyst documents the requirements, the team estimates the development effort, but the main question remains unanswered: will the solution deliver more value than it costs? In This talk, I will show how to turn a stakeholder request into a testable product hypothesis and assess its economic impact before designing the system. Using an end-to-end case study, I will explain what data to request from the business, how to choose metrics, estimate potential revenue or savings, and account for development and maintenance. If precise data is unavailable, I will show how to develop several scenarios and make the assumptions explicit.