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Product and requirements

Phase 2 of 16 in the complete engineering review.

Strategy, discovery, requirements, prioritization, outcomes, experimentation, and product lifecycle.

Assess every control as Pass, Fail, Blocked, or Not Applicable. A Pass needs current evidence for the exact product, revision, artifact, configuration, environment, and data state under review.

Product and Business Readiness

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/01-product-and-business-readiness.md; 14 non-duplicative controls.

Product definition

  • USEQ-13EC8AE3 — The problem, intended users, release scope, non-goals, and deferred features are documented.
  • USEQ-429BBD1E — Critical user journeys are identified and ranked by user and business impact.
  • USEQ-9DBA28BF — Critical journeys cover onboarding, normal use, error recovery, account recovery, cancellation, and data/account deletion where applicable.
  • USEQ-AFDBA1B7 — Behavior is specified for unavailable dependencies, partial failures, empty data, malformed data, incomplete data, stale data, and conflicting data.
  • USEQ-6925AA24 — Pricing, entitlements, quotas, limits, billing, cancellation, refund, reversal, dispute, and undo behavior are unambiguous.
  • USEQ-CE594458 — Customer-support obligations, service hours, maintenance expectations, SLOs, SLAs, and contractual commitments are documented and aligned.
  • USEQ-F951491B — Product and marketing claims are supported by implemented behavior and evidence.

Launch objectives

  • USEQ-42AA91B8 — Define measurable launch success, failure, stop, and rollback criteria.
  • USEQ-6E15410E — Define adoption, conversion, quality, reliability, support, safety, and abuse indicators as applicable.
  • USEQ-E84CA4EA — Define who may pause, continue, expand, or roll back the launch.
  • USEQ-B636D78E — Establish whether launch is internal, private, regional, percentage-based, invitation-only, or public.
  • USEQ-CD424A12 — Ensure product, marketing, sales, support, and operations use the same release date and scope.
  • USEQ-B319D366 — Ensure help content, screenshots, tours, pricing pages, documentation, and legal text match released behavior.
  • USEQ-2A991D71 — Notify customers of breaking changes, downtime, migrations, or changed data use where required.

Product Strategy, Vision, and Outcomes

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/02-product-strategy-vision-and-outcomes.md; 14 non-duplicative controls.

Category-specific universal rules

  • USEQ-3F2DC642 — State the user or societal problem independently of a preferred solution.
  • USEQ-232B216A — Define target users, buyers, operators, administrators, support teams, and affected non-users.
  • USEQ-E1BD3483 — Define the intended outcome and observable evidence that the problem is reduced.
  • USEQ-66F98F70 — Define strategic non-goals and choices to prevent unbounded scope.
  • USEQ-4E6FBFF6 — Validate that the product aligns with organizational mission, capabilities, risk appetite, and operating model.
  • USEQ-F06D1CFF — Describe the value exchange, including what users provide in money, data, attention, effort, or lock-in.
  • USEQ-F7E05701 — Identify alternatives, substitutes, and the cost of not building the product.
  • USEQ-BA54C71F — Define quality attributes as part of the value proposition rather than downstream technical concerns.
  • USEQ-FB65AC3C — Define ethical, legal, accessibility, privacy, security, reliability, and sustainability boundaries.
  • USEQ-1BF8A0A2 — Specify assumptions about demand, willingness, behavior, channels, support, and unit economics.
  • USEQ-02161588 — Test the riskiest assumptions before scaling irreversible investment.
  • USEQ-92DBE30F — Ensure strategy can be understood and used to make prioritization trade-offs.
  • USEQ-0E97500F — Review strategy when market evidence, regulation, technology, incidents, or user needs change.
  • USEQ-48034FED — Do not confuse a roadmap, feature list, architecture, or revenue target with a product strategy.

Product Discovery and Problem Validation

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/03-product-discovery-and-problem-validation.md; 15 non-duplicative controls.

Category-specific universal rules

  • USEQ-43785162 — Use multiple evidence sources rather than relying on stakeholder opinion or a single research method.
  • USEQ-B77E43E7 — Recruit participants representative of relevant abilities, contexts, languages, devices, roles, and risk profiles.
  • USEQ-0ED90387 — Separate observed behavior from stated preference and researcher interpretation.
  • USEQ-1EC01EEF — Document research questions, sampling, methods, consent, limitations, and analysis approach.
  • USEQ-D64D10C7 — Protect participant privacy, dignity, safety, compensation fairness, and withdrawal rights.
  • USEQ-372C9D37 — Validate problem frequency, severity, current workarounds, switching costs, and consequences.
  • USEQ-6D65C0B7 — Investigate why the problem exists before optimizing the visible symptom.
  • USEQ-638BEA5E — Include edge users and people most likely to be harmed or excluded.
  • USEQ-FB9037E1 — Use prototypes and experiments appropriate to the uncertainty being reduced.
  • USEQ-446AFA18 — Avoid presenting speculative or unsafe prototypes as operational promises.
  • USEQ-AA7C1D23 — Triangulate qualitative findings with behavioral, operational, market, and support evidence.
  • USEQ-2E0A4FD3 — Record disconfirming evidence and avoid confirmation-biased research plans.
  • USEQ-EE58AEEE — Validate desirability, usability, feasibility, viability, accessibility, security, privacy, and operability together.
  • USEQ-630E7D69 — Stop discovery activities when additional evidence no longer changes decisions materially.
  • USEQ-82E8E2F9 — Translate validated findings into traceable requirements, design constraints, and measurable outcomes.

Requirements Engineering

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/04-requirements-engineering.md; 17 non-duplicative controls.

Category-specific universal rules

  • USEQ-735B6BCE — Identify all requirement sources and their authority, including users, operators, law, contracts, risk, standards, and dependencies.
  • USEQ-7B2F50E9 — Distinguish needs, goals, constraints, functional requirements, quality requirements, interface requirements, and design decisions.
  • USEQ-FD9E56C3 — Write requirements that are necessary, singular, unambiguous, feasible, verifiable, consistent, and traceable.
  • USEQ-639F791F — State the subject, required behavior or property, conditions, thresholds, units, and tolerances.
  • USEQ-60E89506 — Avoid subjective terms such as fast, intuitive, secure, scalable, or robust without measurable meaning.
  • USEQ-00B1BC4F — Define normal, alternate, exception, degraded, recovery, and prohibited behavior.
  • USEQ-3640A26A — Specify data, state, timing, ordering, concurrency, retention, and authorization semantics.
  • USEQ-E6110D89 — Specify accessibility, privacy, security, reliability, support, observability, and lifecycle requirements explicitly.
  • USEQ-9C6943D9 — Resolve conflicts and record the rationale and authority for resolution.
  • USEQ-2AFFB86B — Validate requirements with representative stakeholders and intended users.
  • USEQ-15B9169F — Link every approved requirement to acceptance criteria and planned verification.
  • USEQ-F8007542 — Control requirement changes and analyze downstream impact before approval.
  • USEQ-52E6B01C — Preserve history and effective dates; do not silently rewrite accepted requirements.
  • USEQ-CAAD1092 — Identify derived requirements and the assumptions from which they follow.
  • USEQ-E6A9E01F — Remove requirements that no longer support an approved need rather than preserving them by inertia.

Category no-go conditions

  • USEQ-72F577BC — Critical quality attributes are implied but not specified.
  • USEQ-E26272FA — Requirements cannot be verified objectively or traced to an authorized need.

Prioritization, Roadmaps, and Scope Control

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/05-prioritization-roadmaps-and-scope-control.md; 15 non-duplicative controls.

Category-specific universal rules

  • USEQ-90F20378 — Prioritize outcomes and risks before individual feature requests.
  • USEQ-92888739 — Use explicit criteria such as user impact, strategic fit, risk reduction, urgency, learning value, cost, reversibility, and dependency value.
  • USEQ-D0EAD736 — Include reliability, security, privacy, accessibility, maintenance, support, and debt work in the same prioritization system.
  • USEQ-1CA42AE8 — Make stakeholder influence and mandatory obligations visible rather than hiding them inside scores.
  • USEQ-137336BA — Represent uncertainty and sensitivity instead of treating prioritization scores as objective truth.
  • USEQ-79915E9D — Identify prerequisites, sequencing constraints, migration needs, and operational readiness work.
  • USEQ-60BEFCD2 — Define the smallest coherent scope that can safely produce evidence or value.
  • USEQ-80609BBD — Protect critical quality attributes from being traded away implicitly to meet dates.
  • USEQ-DE6C27A5 — Use roadmaps to communicate intent, hypotheses, sequence, and confidence—not false certainty.
  • USEQ-5E98FA21 — Distinguish committed obligations from targets, options, and exploratory work.
  • USEQ-01BD0F61 — Define entry and exit criteria for roadmap stages.
  • USEQ-01BCFAAE — Reassess priorities when assumptions, incidents, capacity, regulation, or user evidence changes.
  • USEQ-3B778F2C — Limit work in progress and stop starting work that cannot be completed to the required quality.
  • USEQ-5B61643E — Make descoping decisions explicit and analyze their impact on support, operations, safety, and future change.
  • USEQ-10689ED1 — Document who made material priority decisions and why.

Product Metrics, Experimentation, and Learning

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/06-product-metrics-experimentation-and-learning.md; 15 non-duplicative controls.

Category-specific universal rules

  • USEQ-0A03EEA5 — Define a small set of outcome metrics linked to user value and product purpose.
  • USEQ-590E9EFF — Pair outcome metrics with guardrails for quality, safety, privacy, accessibility, reliability, abuse, and cost.
  • USEQ-D470C55C — Define event semantics and data-quality requirements before instrumenting them.
  • USEQ-8180A0E5 — Verify that telemetry reflects actual user behavior and not duplicate, missing, synthetic, or bot events.
  • USEQ-9C795830 — Pre-register experiment hypothesis, population, unit, allocation, duration, primary measure, guardrails, and stopping rules.
  • USEQ-F5E0C7E3 — Use randomization or a credible causal method when making causal claims.
  • USEQ-FA653F6A — Prevent sample-ratio mismatch, cross-group contamination, novelty effects, peeking, and repeated-testing bias.
  • USEQ-C9444031 — Segment results to detect harmed cohorts without data dredging or privacy-invasive profiling.
  • USEQ-B58791C5 — Do not ship a statistically significant result that is practically harmful or strategically irrelevant.
  • USEQ-5391DDEE — Treat inconclusive and negative results as learning rather than pressure to manipulate analysis.
  • USEQ-11E13BB4 — Preserve experiment configuration, code, data lineage, analysis, and decision records.
  • USEQ-86D51237 — Ensure users are not exposed to materially unsafe or deceptive variants.
  • USEQ-883443BC — Define feature-flag cleanup, long-term holdout, and post-launch validation plans.
  • USEQ-37C2F56F — Reconcile product analytics with operational, financial, support, and qualitative evidence.
  • USEQ-8EA9F41B — Review whether optimizing a metric is degrading the underlying user outcome.

Product Lifecycle, Deprecation, and Retirement

Consolidated from quality standards/02-product/07-product-lifecycle-deprecation-and-retirement.md; 15 non-duplicative controls.

Category-specific universal rules

  • USEQ-0B5ECDD2 — Define lifecycle states and entry, support, maintenance, deprecation, and retirement criteria.
  • USEQ-E363C389 — Publish support windows and compatibility commitments that the organization can sustain.
  • USEQ-E028DE12 — Track adoption, usage, critical customers, integrations, dependencies, and data before deprecation.
  • USEQ-3ACFDDBF — Provide proportionate notice, migration guidance, export, tooling, and support.
  • USEQ-43188F99 — Avoid breaking security, accessibility, legal, or data-access obligations during reduced support.
  • USEQ-33C4E64B — Define how defects and vulnerabilities are handled during maintenance and extended-support periods.
  • USEQ-B5593A92 — Prevent new dependencies on components already marked for retirement.
  • USEQ-B7C71F97 — Measure migration progress and contact customers at risk of disruption.
  • USEQ-65B667B8 — Keep old and new versions interoperable for the documented transition where required.
  • USEQ-BD2D6F7B — Define final data export, retention, deletion, legal hold, and backup behavior.
  • USEQ-CD275A7D — Revoke credentials, domains, certificates, endpoints, jobs, queues, infrastructure, and supplier access during retirement.
  • USEQ-79D1353B — Preserve required records and evidence after operational systems are removed.
  • USEQ-0151D776 — Verify that retired assets are no longer reachable, billed, monitored as active, or processing data.
  • USEQ-8429659A — Provide rollback or continuity options for failed migrations where practical.
  • USEQ-94B6F552 — Conduct a retirement review and capture lessons for future lifecycle planning.

Standards and source references

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