#36 What Hansel & Gretel can teach us about requirements

Hi everyone!

It has been a busy month. Mine was especially busy because I talked at a conference a couple of weeks ago. Which – let's be honest – was all an elaborate excuse to draw some birds!

The background here is that when I was asked to return to speak at BA Life 2025, I decided that I wanted to talk about requirements – the bread and butter of business analysis. But, you know, not in a boring way. 

This was when I came up with the insane idea to talk about requirements using Hansel & Gretel as a metaphor. Did it work? I'm still not entirely sure, but I did it anyway.

So this month's article (and yes, we're back to monthly articles) is a blow-by-blow of the talk which I titled Requirements Are Breadcrumbs: So Watch Out for Birds!

In it, I stretch the Hansel and Gretel metaphor quite far. But hopefully in a fun way. Read it for a fun take on the purpose of requirements, how we can treat Hansel & Gretel as a project, and if we did, what we can learn. The article is live on my website now.

This was a really fun talk to pull together. Not least because I got to deep-dive on the really silly (but quite fun to entertain) concept of a Hansel & Gretel Requirements Response framework™️.

In my talk, it was essentially a throwaway joke about the relationship between risk, complexity, and requirements rigour ... but, I actually spent a lot of time developing the concept. A comically large amount of time. I even created a visual!

And this is an example of one of the more important things I've learnt about working with Claude or ChatGPT (in this case Claude): they are an enthusiastic supporter of absolutely any insane idea you have. I really cannot stress this enough – do not think that you're actually validating your weird ideas when you're talking to it.

If it is telling you that you're insightful? My advice is to go find a human to validate that claim. And if that human looks at you like you're insane – well – you might need to prompt your AI to be a bit more critical and less worshipping.

Then again, it was a fun rabbit hole to fall down.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this (or anything else), so do reply to this email, DM me on LinkedIn, or send me a letter via pigeon. 

I cannot tell you how much I like hearing from y'all!

And until next time, stay excellent! 💖
Hannah