A Wish List Cannot Directly Become a Development Backlog

What is the real distance between a “wish list” of cross-departmental expectations and a “requirements backlog” that can be handed directly to a development team?

Often, people assume the only thing missing is a project owner who can translate text into system specifications. Once the meetings are over and the forms are collected, blindly following the list seems like the most logical next step.

But this is exactly where the trouble begins.

The items submitted by employees are usually a mix of expectations, complaints, and various imaginations of the status quo. A few might be precise, but most are extremely vague. More often than not, they are actually complaining about how clunky the old process is, or subtly hinting that another department isn’t doing its job. If this list is passed down without being organized, the person receiving it is handed a tangled mess of unknown organizational emotions and expectations.

Wishes are Raw Materials, Yet to Be Washed

Making a wish list certainly has value. It allows voices hidden in the cracks of processes to be heard.

You might see frontline staff write, “I wish reports could be generated automatically.” Only by asking further will you discover that they spend half a day every week copying and pasting numbers from five different systems. Someone else might write, “I hope the approval process can be faster,” but the reality is that a document is often stuck in a manager’s rarely-logged-in inbox for days.

These situations deserve to be seen. But they cannot directly enter development.

The simple phrase “I wish reports could be generated automatically” hides questions like who maintains the data, how the fields are defined, and whose fault it is if the numbers are wrong. If this isn’t clarified first, direct development usually leads to endless rework.

The Assignee Needs a Pass to Ask Questions

When the boss says, “Please take charge and build what everyone wished for,” the most easily omitted step is empowering that person to go back and ask questions.

Who proposed this? How often does the problem occur? Who normally manages the data? Who will do the acceptance testing once it’s built?

Asking these questions can be annoying. Especially in an organization eager to see results, pausing to ask questions is often mistaken for stalling progress.

But without these answers, the assignee can only guess. Guessing what kind of report the business unit wants, or guessing if IT can actually pull the data. When the product is finally built, everyone adds, “This isn’t quite what I had in mind,” and the whole project has to start over.

Automated Notifications Sometimes Just Make Chaos Run Faster

Many wishes written on paper are actually process problems in disguise.

“I hope the system can automatically follow up” sounds like a simple notification feature. But looking deeper often reveals that after a form is submitted, no one knows which stage it’s stuck at, or the manager didn’t set a deputy when traveling. Sometimes, the assignee doesn’t even have permission to check the progress.

If we only build automated follow-ups in this situation, the system will just work very hard to remind everyone to run the same chaotic process.

Handing the Wish List to One Person Usually Doesn’t Work

If you hand this to IT, they understand the technology but may not be able to push the business units to adjust their processes. If you let the business unit lead, they know where the friction is but often don’t know the database and security constraints. Finding one person to shoulder all expectations usually results in heavy responsibility but very few resources to deploy.

The more reasonable approach is to let different people bring in their pieces of the puzzle. The business unit must clarify the scenarios and acceptance criteria, while IT holds the red lines for data and permissions. Priority and cross-departmental arguments must be settled by the management layer.

Turn Wishes into Questions First

If the list has already been collected, I suggest not calling it a requirements backlog just yet. We can first translate each wish into a question to pursue.

Translating wishes into questions is about figuring out what current situation the organization needs to face first.

Once translated, you’ll find that some expectations can indeed be solved with new features. But a large part actually requires reorganizing processes or clarifying responsibilities between departments.

Change “Build It” to “Translate It First”

If I were the assigned person, I would want the boss to take back the phrase “build everyone’s wishes.”

Replace it with: “Please translate these lists into requirement judgments, clarify the underlying processes and priorities, and then come back and say what is worth entering development.”

These two sentences are vastly different. The former pushes a person directly into a delivery dead end, while the latter gives them room to explore and lets other departments know: this isn’t just about throwing out demands; you also have to help confirm the process and bear the responsibility of trade-offs.

A wish list can be a great starting point. But only after actual requirement interviews, clear process inventory, and prioritization does it become suitable for a development backlog.