Requirements Discovery for Business Analysts - 2026

This section of the course is designed to teach IT business analysts essential skills and techniques to effectively prepare for requirements discovery workshops and other collaborative elicitation sessions with the project stakeholders.

In this lecture, I introduce you to the company we use in this course, its location, profile, client base, and specialization. I provide an overview of the e-commerce platforms we work with, as well as the profile of our software development, strategy, and UX teams.

In this lecture, we receive an introductory email from Jim, our company's Vice President, check instant messages, receive materials from the pre-sales account manager, and view the workweek calendar.

As we get introduced to a new project, we explore the client's website to gain insights into what they do and the e-commerce capabilities they have today. We check the "About Us," home page, and product catalog sections. We analyze and explore product details, shipping options, and other online capabilities.

In this lecture, we review the pre-sales documents that have been provided by the Account Manager. We gain insights into the initial business objectives, identify the client's pain points, and explore the proposed technology stack.

During this team call, Jim announces a new deal and the onsite visit scheduled for next week. Within the team, we internally align on the immediate tasks and next steps. We briefly get to know other team members.

We engage in a brief conversation with Arnie, the account manager. During the call, Arnie confirms the client's objectives and provides additional pre-sales insights.

In this lecture, we participate in a team call led by Jim, who establishes the goals for the week for our team. Following that, we have a round of introductions where each team member introduces themselves and their roles on the project.

Following the team call, we set up input and output folders and upload existing materials. We compose an initial email to the client's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), setting the tone, making introductions, and requesting additional details on behalf of the discovery team.

As we prepare for the next steps, we review the available platform feature lists and standard questionnaires we use for e-commerce projects. We discuss how and when to use those standard lists and what "out of the box" means. Meanwhile, we receive an email reply from Drew, the client's CTO.

In this lecture, we focus on building the schedule for our upcoming onsite workshops. Using the information we already have, we begin working on the agenda and establish a timing framework for the workshops. This establishes the foundation that we'll fill out with specific meetings during the next steps.

Let's align on the terminology and discuss the common types of meetings used during the onsite discovery workshops: kick-off, show-and-tell, interviews, workshops, and others. Let's talk about the purpose and best uses for each of them.

We start Monday with the organizational kick-off meeting, covering existing business capabilities and the technical landscape. Later in the day, we will discuss project priorities and success criteria, daily workshop outcomes, and have an informal Q&A session.

On Tuesday, we proceed by adding more deep dive sessions into the functional and technical aspects of the product data models, checkout flow, payments, and integrations.

We continue by adding requirements sessions related to search, content management, digital asset management, and personalization. Additionally, we address content translation and localization requirements.

We finalize the week's schedule by adding more deep dive sessions, including topics on international shipping, marketing capabilities, ways of working, system demo, and "out of the box" features. We utilize color coding to distinguish between organizational, functional, technical, UX, and strategy meetings.

Today, we meet with the client to discuss plans for the onsite visit and introduce ourselves. We also discuss who from the client's side needs to attend meetings and what preparations are needed.

During the day, we write a follow-up email and send the agenda to the client. We also receive the materials on user segments that we requested earlier. Later in the day, we start working on an outline for the kick-off presentation, which will be used to create the actual slides on Friday.

In this lecture, we map out the kick-off slides, starting from scratch and using the outline created yesterday as a guide. We learn how to make the title slide business-focused and visually appealing. We proceed with a table of contents, a meet and greet slide, slides for the business goals, solution, and case studies.

We continue building out the kick-off presentation by adding slides with the case studies, discovery agenda, and the next steps.

Let's quickly recap the slides prepared for the kick-off and conduct a final review with our discovery team.

We ensure to collect and store in one place the materials prepared for the discovery visit - the agenda, questionnaires, and slides. Additionally, we address logistics such as hotels and transportation.

Let's summarize our efforts and recap our accomplishments throughout this week in preparation for the discovery visit.

In this short bonus, I'll show you how to hold the discovery backlog in Jira so the team can work from it after the workshops - not only from a spreadsheet. Watch it after you've looked at the Product Backlog sample in the previous lecture.

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