Stakeholder Requests Are Not Requirements

Symptoms aren’t specs.

“Can you just add this one filter?”

Translation: “I don’t trust the data.”

“Can we duplicate this report for my team?”

Translation: “We don’t understand what this one’s doing.”

Most stakeholder requests are not requirements.

They’re signals.

Signals of confusion, fear, misalignment, or bad incentives.

And if you treat every request literally...you’ll drown in them.

Your job isn’t to fulfill wishes.

It’s to find the need behind the noise.

Push back. Ask why. Refuse the tenth slicer.

Because the best dashboards weren’t built by order-takers.

They were built by translators.