Stop playing requirements telephone

A customer spends weeks in discovery explaining their complex marketing analytics workflow. The BA carefully documents everything. The requirements look comprehensive. The customer signs off. Six months later, in UAT, the customer takes one look at what was built and says: "This isn't what we meant at all."

Sound familiar? That's requirements telephone—and it's killing your projects.

Context Erosion

Let's trace the journey of a single customer need through a typical implementation:

Customer says: "When someone makes their first big purchase, we need to make sure they get a referral code and are assigned to our organic demand gen team for future cultivation."

BA writes: "System shall create high-value customer record and assign to VIP demand gen queue when purchase amount exceeds $5,000."

Architect interprets: "Create custom object for high value customers with workflow rule to assign based on amount field."

Developer builds: Auto-assignment workflow that triggers on any $5,000+ purchase.

Customer discovers in UAT: The system is assigning their frequent small-dollar customers to VIP demand gen, and long-lost customers from years ago are bloating the high-value queue.

Each handoff strips away a little more context. Each person in the chain makes reasonable assumptions based on incomplete information. By the time you get to UAT, you're not just missing requirements—you're missing the entire intent behind the requirements.

Intent v Delivery

Requirements telephone isn't just about losing details—it's about losing meaning. And meaning is everything in software implementations.

Consider these real examples of context getting lost in translation:

Customer intent: "We want volunteers to see donor information so they can have meaningful conversations."

What got built: Full donor database access for all volunteers.

What they actually meant: "Show volunteer coordinators the names of donors who've specifically opted into volunteer recognition, so volunteers can thank them appropriately."

Or this one:

Customer intent: "Board members need to see our financial performance in real-time."

What got built: Live dashboard with every transaction streaming in.

What they actually meant: "Monthly summary reports available within a week of month-end, because our board meets monthly and wants current data."

The requirements were technically accurate. The implementations were technically correct. But the context—the business reality behind the words—got completely lost.

It's Not BAs' Fault

Here's what we heard from one experienced consultant: "Today, BAs will write requirements & ACs with knowledge of customer context, and then hand them off to developers - but because the developers don't know the customer context, sometimes they implement the requirements in a way that isn't ideal for the customer."

This isn't a people problem. It's a process problem.

BAs are doing their jobs perfectly. They're gathering requirements, writing user stories, creating acceptance criteria. But they're being asked to compress hours of nuanced customer conversations into bullet points that developers can implement.

It's like asking someone to explain a Shakespeare play through interpretive dance, then having someone else recreate the play based only on watching the dance. Something's going to get lost.

The Game of Telephone Never Ends

The context leak doesn't stop at development handoff. It continues through every phase:

During Build: "The requirement says 'send email notification,' but to whom? The donor? The gift officer? The database admin? Let me guess..."

During Testing: "The test script says 'verify email is sent,' but nobody knows what the email should actually say or when it should be triggered."

During UAT: "This technically meets the requirement, but it's completely wrong for our process."

During Training: "The system does what the requirements said, but we have no idea why it was built this way or how it fits into our actual workflow."

Each phase operates with less context than the one before. By the time you reach go-live, you're flying blind.

The Million-Dollar Question

One consultant told us about projects where "you spend so much time building things they didn't end up wanting." Another described the constant cycle: "We won't have even talked about it because it's only coming up in the data... There are 400 data points in your current system that aren't in your business requirements, let's make sense of that."

How much of your last implementation was wasted work? How many features got rebuilt because the context was wrong? How many change orders could have been avoided if the development team had understood what the customer actually needed?

If you're honest about it, the number is probably terrifying.

AI Changes Everything

So how do you stop playing telephone with million-dollar implementations?

The answer isn't better handoff processes or more detailed requirements documents. It's context preservation.

What if, instead of summarizing customer conversations into requirements, you could give your development team direct access to the why behind every requirement?

What if every task came with a clear trail back to the original customer conversation that generated it?

What if your developers could understand not just what to build, but why the customer needs it built that way?

AI makes this possible. Not by replacing BAs or developers, but by creating an unbreakable chain of context from customer voice to final implementation.

Instead of this: Customer conversation → BA summary → Requirement → Task → Build

You get this: Customer conversation → AI analysis → Context-rich requirement → Task with business rationale → Build with full understanding

From Telephone to Direct Line

Here's what context preservation looks like in practice:

Traditional approach: "Create workflow to assign high-value customers to demand gen team."

Context-preserved approach: "When Mrs. Johnson made her $5,000 purchase, Sarah mentioned they always personally call first-time high-value customers to thank them and discuss referral opportunities. This workflow should identify first-time customers with an initial purchase above $5,000 and create tasks for the demand gen team."

Same requirement. Completely different implementation. And no surprises in UAT.

The End of Lost in Translation

Requirements telephone has been the dirty secret of software implementations for too long. We've accepted that context will be lost, that developers will have to guess, that customers will be surprised by what they get.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

The technology exists today to preserve customer context throughout the entire implementation lifecycle. To give developers the why behind every requirement. To eliminate the guesswork that leads to rework.

The question isn't whether we can stop playing telephone. The question is: why are we still playing it?

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Ready to preserve customer context from discovery to delivery? See how Glossa maintains perfect traceability between customer conversations and technical implementations—so your developers always know the why behind the what.