ā³ The Hidden Cost of āAlmost Clearā Requirements, and How AI Shrinks Rework Cycles
Most teams do not lose time because they move slowly, they lose time because they move forward without alignment. āAlmost clearā requirements feel like speed, but they quietly inflate cycle time by creating rework, decision churn, and a constant drip of clarifying conversations that arrive too late. If we want real time back, we stop treating requirements as paperwork and start treating them as a time strategy. AI becomes powerful when we use it to turn vague intent into usable clarity early, so we stop rebuilding the same work in different versions. ------------- Context: Where Requirements Become a Time Leak ------------- In most organizations, the requirement stage is where time either gets protected or gets mortgaged. When we skip the hard thinking upfront, we do not eliminate work, we just push it downstream where it is more expensive. We see this in everyday micro-scenarios. A manager asks for āa quick overview deckā for leadership. Someone creates slides, adds charts, writes copy, and shares it. The feedback is not āthis is wrong,ā it is āthis is not quite what I meant.ā Now we are not just revising slides, we are revisiting the definition of the request. The work becomes a discovery process that should have happened before production. Another common pattern is the āinvisible stakeholder.ā We think the request is between two people, but the output is actually meant for five audiences with different needs. The moment that stakeholder appears, the work shifts. The assumptions that were harmless in a narrow context become costly in a broader one. More revisions appear, and the cycle time stretches. Then there is the ārequirements teleport.ā The brief says one thing, but the review conversation references a different goal, or a different constraint, or a new deadline. Everyone is still trying to be helpful, but the target is moving. That movement is time loss in disguise because it creates churn without accountability. What makes this so painful is that rework does not arrive as a single event. It arrives as repeated touches. We revisit the same doc, the same deck, the same plan, each time paying a context switching tax. It is not the minutes of editing that hurt, it is the hours lost to mental reload and coordination.