Analyse First: The Problem, the People and the Criteria
🎯 Today's mission briefing
We are learning to interrogate a real problem before proposing anything — decomposing it, separating functional from non-functional requirements, writing user stories with acceptance criteria, and justifying honestly whether a digital solution is the right answer at all.
You'll know you've got it when:
- I can decompose a real problem into sub-problems and describe the current process as it actually is, not as people say it is
- I can separate functional requirements from non-functional ones, and identify the constraints that rule options out
- I can write user stories with acceptance criteria, and measurable design criteria I will be judged against later
- I can justify whether software is the right answer for this problem, including the case for not building anything
The app that cost twelve thousand dollars and got used four times
Connects to what your guest already knows and makes them curious. Activating prior knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of new learning.
A junior cricket club in regional Queensland had a genuine problem: parents kept turning up to the wrong ground. The committee raised money, hired a developer and commissioned an app. It took seven months. It cost about twelve thousand dollars. Parents downloaded it, opened it once, and went back to the group chat, because the group chat was already on their phone and the app needed a password nobody could remember. Four months later the club was back to a whiteboard photo posted on Friday nights, which worked. Now hold that story next to a second one. A rural fire brigade forty minutes away had a similar-sounding problem — volunteers turning up to the wrong staging area — and built something on a shoestring that is still running six years later. Same category of problem. Opposite outcome. The difference was not the developer, the budget or the technology. The difference was that one of them analysed the problem properly first, and the other one started with the answer.