Product Requirements Stage
Product Requirements Stage helps the founder or programme team complete a focused intervention on user stories, acceptance criteria, backlog and build brief. Within Product, MVP & Technology Development, it turns a broad or uncertain area of the venture into a concrete Bertie work product that can be reviewed, improved and reused. The task is intentionally discrete: it should produce a specific artefact, decision, evidence item or risk signal rather than general learning notes.
Complete a focused intervention that advances Product Requirements Stage. The objective is to remove ambiguity around user stories, acceptance criteria, backlog and build brief, give the founder a decision-ready output, and make it clear whether the venture should progress, repeat the task with stronger evidence, escalate to expert support, or move into a linked stage.
Bertie or a programme manager assigns Product Requirements Stage when the venture needs a decision-ready output for this group. Typical triggers include group-gate reviews, evidence gaps identified by the co-pilot or founder request.
validated problem evidence; target user; solution concept; technical constraints; current product artefacts; specific context for user stories, acceptance criteria, backlog and build brief.
Align the venture team on what the Product Requirements Stage must achieve for the MVP build. Define the exact boundaries of this requirements exercise to prevent scope creep and ensure alignment with core commercial priorities.
ObjectiveEstablishing a clear purpose bounds the engineering effort to strictly necessary user needs. This ensures the venture avoids over-engineering while setting explicit success metrics for the technical team.
What's expectedProduce a brief charter stating the primary build hypothesis, target user group, and strict scope limits for this development cycle. Demonstrate clear alignment between commercial milestones and technical scope.
Open action arrow_forwardConsultant stress-test · 5 questions- 1.What specific commercial hypothesis does this product requirements exercise aim to validate?
- 2.How will you prevent scope creep from inflating the build cost during this development cycle?
- 3.Why is this specific product scope prioritised over alternative feature sets at this stage?
- 4.What evidence proves that target users care enough about this scope to warrant building it now?
- 5.How does setting this scope directly de-risk the immediate technical and market milestones?
- A data-room asset titled Product Requirements Stage
- A clear task output, updated venture DNA and recommended next action
- It should update the venture DNA with specific evidence or decisions about user stories, acceptance criteria, backlog and build brief, create a visible milestone in the founder journey, and generate one or more recommended next tasks
Bertie co-pilot links product choices to customer evidence, flags unsupported features or technical risk, drafts product artefacts, and recommends build, test or compliance tasks. For this task, it should focus on user stories, acceptance criteria, backlog and build brief, prompt the founder for missing inputs, draft or improve the output, flag weak assumptions, and record the result back into the relevant data-room section.
A mentor or evaluator can review the output at the group gate. Programme managers can require an advisor checkpoint before Bertie moves the venture forward.