Why Every Architect Eventually Learns That Requirements Are Wrong

[Abhijeet Upadh2]

One of the biggest lessons I've learned over a decade of working with ServiceNow is that requirements are often wrong, incomplete, or interpreted differently by different stakeholders.

When I started as a developer, I treated requirements as facts. If a requirement document stated a field was mandatory, I built it as mandatory. If a workflow contained ten approval steps, I built ten approval steps.

As I moved into technical leadership and architecture roles, I realised the real value comes from understanding the business outcome rather than blindly implementing requirements.

Many requirements are simply a snapshot of how a process works today. They may contain historical workarounds, duplicated controls, or approvals that no longer provide value. If architects focus solely on implementation, they can inadvertently automate inefficient processes.

Good architects challenge assumptions respectfully. They ask why a requirement exists. They determine whether the business objective can be achieved in a simpler way.

ServiceNow provides significant opportunities to streamline operations, but those opportunities are missed when solution teams become requirement delivery teams rather than business transformation partners.

The most successful projects I've worked on were not those that implemented every requirement exactly as written. They were the projects where the team worked collaboratively with stakeholders to discover the underlying business goal and then designed the simplest solution to achieve it.

For architects, understanding the problem is often more valuable than understanding the requirement.