By Thomas Cohen, founder of Maestro
Understanding application requirements when you are not a technical professional
The document describing your future application takes ten minutes to read, with four questions and a pencil. Reading it badly costs more than reading it slowly: superficial agreement costs months of development. Where to look, in what order, and the five phrases that should make you raise your pencil.
Understanding application requirements takes ten minutes and a pencil, not training. A founder on Reddit (r/vibecoding, June 2026) says the problem lies with them rather than AI's code: they do not know how to write the initial design. Reading this document is easier than writing it, and enough to decide.
Five blocks, whoever the author
Requirements fit into five blocks, whether from an agency, freelancer or agent team. The problem and whom it affects. Journeys: what someone does, screen after screen, from a task's beginning to its end. Your professional rules: what is allowed, forbidden or calculated. Data: what is kept, who sees it and for how long. And exclusions: what this version will not do. A document lacking these five blocks takes three minutes to read because it says nothing. We described elsewhere what such a document must contain before signing.
Ten minutes, broken down
Two minutes on exclusions first: the section determining your bill and schedule, which nobody opens. Three minutes on journeys, following your most frequent customer's route to the end with your finger. Three minutes on rules, searching for yours, those applied without thinking: the loyal customer's discount, the quote expiring after thirty days, the slot never double-booked. Two minutes on data: who sees what. If your simplest rule appears nowhere, it will not exist in the product. Keep a timer: after ten minutes, you are rereading rather than reading, and fatigue will make you approve what you have not understood.
The nod that kills a project
A founder on Reddit (r/startups, July 2026) says the most beautiful document they ever wrote killed nine months of work: two directors had opposing ideas about the product's purpose and both nodded instead of arguing over the document. There was no agreement; each assumed they had won. A quick read intended to approve creates this trap. Useful reading hunts for disagreement: if three people must approve, have each write the product's purpose in one sentence before opening the document.
Four phrases that should stop you
‘The system manages users’: how many roles, and can one employee see another's files? ‘A notification is sent to the customer’: through which channel, when, and what if sending fails? ‘Import existing data’: from which file, with which columns, and who decides duplicates? ‘The amount is calculated’: using which formula, rounded how, including taxes or not? Each phrase hides a decision. If the document does not make it, someone will make it during construction without knowing your profession. A fifth phrase deserves a red pencil whenever it appears: ‘the system adapts to the customer's needs’. It describes nothing and returns six weeks later as an extra invoice or missing feature.
An agent team's document has a specific flaw
An agency sends long requirements with appendices and a schedule: apply the same framework and request a short version if the five blocks are buried. An agent-produced document, like Victor's at Maestro after Margaux's scoping, has an advantage and a flaw. The advantage: correcting it costs nothing; it rewrites while you speak, making reading worthwhile. The flaw: it is plausible everywhere, including where it guessed a rule it could not know. What you review is therefore the project's real deliverable, not a formality before serious work.
In practice
Open the document beside a notebook and note three lines, no more: a missing professional rule, a journey stopping before the end, a word you do not understand. Send those three lines back before saying ‘Looks good to me’: at Maestro, this gate blocks progress until you answer, and it exists for exactly this reason. If you have no document yet, the awkward-questions method produces one in an hour.