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Summary – A bulky requirements document creates rigidity, endless validation delays, stakeholder disengagement, and rising management costs, while stifling innovation and detaching the project from real needs. With heavy approval cycles and untested assumptions, time-to-market lengthens and ROI erodes.
Solution: implement design-first co-design workshops, rapid prototyping, value-focused MVPs, light governance, and a Lean roadmap to stay agile, reduce risks, and continuously align IT and business.
Drafting a comprehensive specification document is often regarded as the cornerstone of any digital project. Yet this bulky document can sometimes create gaps between actual needs and initial specifications, weigh down decision-making processes, and slow your teams’ responsiveness. For decision-makers seeking a SaaS solution, a mobile app, business software, or a digital platform, the challenge is to balance agility with discipline. This guide proposes moving beyond the myth of the specification document as a mandatory step by prioritizing collaboration, rapid concept visualization (design-first), and strategic prioritization. With this approach, you quickly define a relevant MVP, focus your resources on delivering real value, and significantly reduce your time-to-market. We illustrate each point with concrete examples from Swiss companies to inspire your strategy.
The Limitations of the Traditional Specification Document
The specification document can sometimes become a too-rigid foundation, incapable of evolving in response to field discoveries. Its creation mobilizes significant resources before the first prototypes even exist, risking an unnecessary extension of your time-to-market.
Rigid Specifications
The specification document sets an exhaustive framework from the outset, detailing every feature, user scenario, and technical constraint. But this approach doesn’t always incorporate insights from early feedback or user testing.
When new requirements emerge, integrating them demands formal revisions, approval cycles, and extra meetings. Each change becomes a project in itself.
Ultimately, this approach can leave the project trapped in dated specification lists, ignoring evolving business needs or market opportunities.
Approval Delays and Time-to-Market
Drafting and approving the specification document often involves multiple countries and departments, generating back-and-forth exchanges and unexpected delays. Scoping meetings pile up, slowing decision-making.
The delays accumulated before development even begins directly impact time-to-market, reducing the company’s ability to seize early opportunities.
This can trigger a domino effect, where a delayed launch of an application or digital platform benefits your more agile competitors.
Lack of Stakeholder Buy-In
Engaging end users, marketing teams, or operations too late in a fixed document reduces their commitment. Stakeholders may perceive the specification as imposed, without real consideration for their specific needs.
Without collective ownership, stakeholders may not engage in testing or validation phases, resulting in late feedback and costly revisions at the end of the project.
For example, a mid-sized Swiss watchmaker spent over three months finalizing its customer platform specification. During the acceptance phase, internal teams flagged major gaps, necessitating two redefinition cycles. The project was pushed back six months, impacting the marketing schedule and user satisfaction.
Risks of a Specification Document: When Formalism Stifles Innovation
The need to comply with a strict specification can suffocate creativity and risk-taking. Obsessing over initial details often disconnects the project from the market’s actual and fluid needs.
Blocking Emerging Ideas
The specification document defines features before any user exploration or design sprint has even been conducted. This rigid anticipation limits the emergence of innovative ideas discovered during product discovery.
When new concepts appear, they’re often deemed out of scope, requiring amendments or budget renegotiations. Teams become reluctant to propose alternative approaches.
As a result, the project stalls on preconceived solutions, missing out on collective intelligence and on-the-ground feedback.
Disconnect from Real User Needs
A static document cannot capture the dynamic evolution of user needs or emerging usage patterns. The personas and use cases initially described quickly become obsolete.
Without regular feedback, development rests on assumptions, increasing the risk of delivering non-priority or poorly adopted features.
This disconnect often leads to low adoption rates and business teams feeling alienated from technological decisions.
Hidden Cost of Rigorous Compliance
Ensuring compliance with the specification document requires tools and monitoring processes (committees, reports, acceptance tests). These resources can account for up to 20% of a digital project’s total budget.
Teams spend more time in meetings and reporting than on development and innovation. Cushions to satisfy every line of the document drag down velocity.
A Swiss financial institution preparing an internal portal found that 18% of its project budget was consumed by validation committees and change management. This overrun delayed the launch and increased the TCO.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Collaboration and Design-First: An Alternative Approach
Co-design and design-first workshops align business needs and technical solutions. Rapid prototyping enables continuous experimentation, validation, and refinement before any large-scale development.
UX and Design Thinking Workshops
Workshops bring business teams, IT, and end users together around a whiteboard. This rapid pooling of ideas fosters mutual understanding and identification of real priorities.
In just a few hours, teams generate empirical user journeys, test hypotheses, and refine functional requirements before formalizing anything in writing.
This collective engagement builds co-ownership and ensures better buy-in during later development phases.
Rapid Prototyping to Validate Concepts
A clickable prototype or interactive wireframe lets you envision the final product without writing a single line of code. Feedback is immediate and easy to integrate.
Adjustments happen in real time, drastically reducing revision cycles compared to textual specification feedback.
In practice, teams quickly identify misunderstood flows, secondary features, and friction points before any heavy budget commitment.
Iterative Feedback and Continuous Refinement
Based on the prototype, sprints follow with frequent demos to stakeholders. Each iteration progressively enriches the truly useful scope.
This Lean product approach ensures the project stays connected to business objectives and field realities, avoiding variances from initial assumptions.
A Swiss pharmaceutical company used this approach to overhaul its internal training portal. In three successive workshops, it invalidated two secondary features and focused development on an interactive reporting module, cutting the backlog by 40% by the MVP stage.
Strategic Prioritization and Launching an Agile MVP
Defining an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) focuses efforts on the most critical business value. A lightweight governance model ensures agile management, ROI orientation, and continuous adaptation.
Product Discovery and Lean Roadmap
The product discovery phase merges user insights, market data, and technical constraints to rank features. Prioritization workshops (MoSCoW, Kano) guide decisions.
A Lean roadmap is built, segmented into short releases aligned with business strategy, avoiding exhaustive specification gathering.
This balance of long-term vision and quick iterations supports agility while ensuring overall project coherence.
Defining a Value-Driven MVP
The MVP concentrates development on features essential to validate key hypotheses: user acquisition, engagement, and retention.
This approach mitigates financial and technical risk by testing the product’s relevance early on a limited segment.
A retail chain launched its mobile app as an MVP in three months. It validated the basic ordering flow before investing in the advanced payment module, optimizing resources and limiting initial investment.
Agile Management and Lightweight Governance
The project is tracked via a single product backlog, fueled by prioritized user stories reviewed each sprint. Performance indicators (KPIs, OKRs) measure the real impact of new features.
Lightweight governance relies on short rituals (stand-up, sprint review, retrospective) and transparent communication between IT, business teams, and vendors. This replaces the multi-monthly committees of the classic specification approach.
Adjustments are made continuously, allowing course corrections at the first sign of deviation, without waiting for the end of a traditional specification phase.
Launch Your Digital Project by Unleashing Innovation
The specification document remains useful for aligning stakeholders on an initial vision, but its formality must not hinder creativity or responsiveness. By combining co-design workshops, rapid prototyping, and a value-focused MVP, you optimize development cycles, reduce risks, and engage your teams from the first deliverables.
Whether you’re steering a process transformation, launching a SaaS, a business tool, or creating a mobile app, our Edana experts will support you in adapting this agile, context-driven approach to your business challenges. They’ll help you harness collective intelligence and deploy a scalable, secure solution perfectly aligned with your strategy.
