Requirements and Specifications - Know the difference.

To build a successful product you must have a clear idea of what to build and how to plan for it.

It all starts with writing down the requirements and specifications. Requirements and specifications, often used interchangeably, are very different. Requirement is what the product is expected to do. Specifications are how the product is going to achieve it.

When designing a product, if you are lucky you will be given both to start the design. More often than not, you have to come up with both of them.

Other than that, requirements should be implementation free. It should just state what is required without identifying the how. It should be atomic, meaning each line must have only one requirement. Make sure there are no duplicates, one might use different terminologies to express the same thing.

The keen ones jump to selecting components right at the requirements phase. And worse yet selecting the same component for all the projects. This is not good engineering practice.

Don’t stop at building projects, go further, make products.