Requirements gathering (for agent factories)

Turning intent into an agent-ready seed: discovery techniques, scenarios, traceability, and explicit handoffs so downstream factories do not guess.

Requirements gathering in an agentic organization is not “write a ticket and disappear.” The output must become a seed: structured intent that the coding factory, validation harness, and other teams can consume without inventing gaps.

What changes

You design for handoffs. Every artifact should answer: “What does the next actor—or next factory—need to treat this as their seed?”
Ambiguity is expensive at machine speed. A vague brief that once produced slow human code now produces wrong software faster.
Whole-flow literacy beats silo expertise: product, design, engineering, and leadership need a shared picture of seed → implement → validate → ship → evolve.

Common techniques

Structured discovery — workshops, interviews, and job-to-be-done framing that feed explicit acceptance and non-functional constraints (not only feature lists).
Scenario-first drafting — observable behaviors, edge cases, and holdout language that can feed scenarios vs tests thinking.
Collaborative specification — spec-driven development with the agent before implementation churn; living docs (SRS, ADRs, conventions) that stay versioned with the system.
Traceability — links from intent → spec → scenarios → validation so drift is visible when code or APIs change.
Definition of done for the seed — the seed is not “PM approved”; it is agent- and harness-ready (conventions, boundaries, negative paths, data contracts).

Roles

Gathering requirements is still a human coordination problem. See Stakeholder and role shifts and Realization time vs coding speed for how product owners, developers, CTOs, and business stakeholders feel this shift.