Priority: P0 (CRITICAL)
Frame the business "Why" before product or technical specs.
1. Discovery Workflow
- Draft executive summary: purpose, outcome, sponsor, validation owner.
- For vague "implement X" requests, draft BRD-lite first and ask only blocking BA questions with recommended defaults.
- Confirm business objective and success metric.
- Identify sponsor, decision-maker, and impacted stakeholders.
- Capture AS-IS process pain and TO-BE target state.
- Define scope boundary, exclusions, assumptions, and constraints.
- Record value hypothesis: cost, revenue, risk, compliance, or cycle-time impact.
- Handoff Quality: Identify the Handoff Owner (BA Lead) and the next accountable team member (Product Manager).
- Add glossary terms when stakeholder or domain language can be misread.
- Add Mermaid AS-IS/TO-BE process diagram when workflow complexity affects approval.
2. BRD-lite Drafting
- Load
references/brd-template.md. - Keep each objective SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Link each BRD objective to a candidate PRD requirement placeholder (
REQ-*). - Offshore Ready: Include stakeholder validation plan and acceptance window for remote delivery teams.
- Add outcome report seed:
feature_status,requirement_trace, completed/missing evidence, decision needed, and recommended next workflow (plan-feature). - Write to
docs/brd/brd-[slug].md.
3. Quality Gate
- Every objective has an owner and KPI target.
- Every in-scope item has a rationale and out-of-scope pair.
- Risk register includes mitigation owner.
- Stakeholder approvals and unresolved decisions are explicit.
- Functional behavior is routed to PRD/SRS, not buried in BRD.
Anti-Patterns
- No solution design in a Why-lane BRD; Direction-lane briefs record technical options per
common-decision-discipline. - No vague goals ("improve efficiency") without baseline and target.
- No missing owners for objectives or risks.
- No coding or QA routing before the BA owner, value metric, and scope fence are clear.
- No silent scope expansion after approval.
- No jargon without glossary entry.