Business Requirements Expert

Priority: P0 (CRITICAL)

Frame the business "Why" before product or technical specs.

1. Discovery Workflow

• Draft executive summary: purpose, outcome, sponsor, validation owner.
• For vague "implement X" requests, draft BRD-lite first from supplied evidence; ask at most 3 consequential blocking questions with recommended defaults per common-decision-discipline. Never re-ask settled decisions.
• Confirm business objective and success metric.
• Identify sponsor, decision-maker, and impacted stakeholders.
• Capture AS-IS process pain and TO-BE target state.
• Define scope boundary, exclusions, assumptions, and constraints. Carry confirmed evidence and explicit non-critical assumptions; blocking unknowns name affected slice, consequence, owner, and required input—no unowned TBD at handoff.
• Record value hypothesis: cost, revenue, risk, compliance, or cycle-time impact.
• Handoff Quality: Identify the Handoff Owner (BA Lead) and the next accountable team member (Product Manager).
• Add glossary terms when stakeholder or domain language can be misread.
• Add Mermaid AS-IS/TO-BE process diagram when workflow complexity affects approval.

2. BRD-lite Drafting

• Load references/brd-template.md.
• Keep each objective SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Link each BRD objective to a candidate PRD requirement placeholder (REQ-*).
• Offshore Ready: Include stakeholder validation plan and acceptance window for remote delivery teams.
• Add outcome report seed: feature_status, requirement_trace, completed/missing evidence, decision needed, and recommended next workflow (plan-feature).
• Write to docs/brd/brd-[slug].md.

3. Quality Gate

• Every objective has an owner and KPI target.

• Every in-scope item has a rationale and out-of-scope pair.

• Risk register includes mitigation owner.

• Stakeholder approvals and unresolved decisions are explicit; consequential unknowns block only affected slices.

• Functional behavior is routed to PRD/SRS, not buried in BRD.

• Sufficiently specified low-risk ticket maintenance may proceed with an in-chat contract without mandatory BRD document detours, provided it carries an accountable owner, approved scope fence, value rationale, and verification target.

• Sensitive changes still require technical design and explicit human/governance approval per requirements modeling §1; low-risk ticket equivalence never removes that floor.

Anti-Patterns

• No solution design in a Why-lane BRD; Direction-lane briefs record technical options per common-decision-discipline.
• No vague goals ("improve efficiency") without baseline and target.
• No missing owners for objectives or risks.
• No coding or QA routing before the accountable owner, value rationale/metric, and scope fence are clear (formal document artifacts may be omitted only with approved low-risk ticket equivalence).
• No silent scope expansion after approval.
• No jargon without glossary entry.

References

• BRD Template
• BRD Checklist
• Requirements Baseline