PixelTree Media

Products live and die by how good their requirements are.

And with so many conversations to be had with stakeholders, customers, other experts in your organisation about the customer, it’s particularly tricky to keep up with note taking while actively looking to expand your questioning when something interesting pops up.

You often end up wading through paragraphs and paragraphs like a treasure hunt for useful information, before then having to connect the dots to the big picture that might be forming 🖼

That’s not easy.

But there are a few simple things we’ve found through our own early stage product discovery and requirement gathering that has trimmed down our note taking time.

🏗️ Have a structure for interviews and meetings: Structure helps conversations move smoothly and allows you to keep your note taking on a specific topic, making it far easier to synthesise notes with other interviews later on.

✏️ Plan team activities with writing: Team meetings can be a nightmare to note take for because everyone can be speaking at once. Having activities that keep people on a specific task and using tools like sticky notes and wireframing can commit ideas to paper and make note taking an easier follow up activity.

📽️ Record team meetings and virtual interviews: Recording virtual meetings and workshops is your new best friend. Not only can you be present on calls and dig deeper without worrying about not writing something down, but tools can automatically transcribe recordings so you don’t have to.

🔧️ Harness project management tools: When it comes to logging all your notes, project management tools can be a great way of having a central location for all points and maintaining an audit log when new points arise.

What note taking tips have we missed out on?

We produced a blog post on things to remember when collecting requirements and this just so happened to be one of them! Read the full post here:

https://pixeltreemedia.co.uk/things-to-remember-when-collecting-requirements/