Do you employ a fortune teller to help you gauge future product requests? If not, you're probably the closest thing to it.

We've all experienced the pain of dealing with something that seems like a trivial product-wide requirement having a substantial cost estimate because the requirements were implemented in the cheapest possible way that unfortunately doesn't allow for easy change in the future. If you've gone through this a few times, you know the pain. Imagine going through a rebranding exercise, changing your product logos and product color scheme. Imagine the frustration and disappointment of being told that it’s going to take 6 months because all of the values are hardcoded in different ways on every screen or something equally inefficient. As product managers we may even be tempted to assume that these things wouldn't happen today - guess again!!

If you are good at anticipating possible change, and have some capacity to absorb slightly more costly implementation costs/time it can go a long way to relieving you from the type of aforementioned pain in the future. When writing your requirements, state possible future needs if they aren't even needed in the short term. For example, you may need to plan for possible support of multiple languages or time zones or currencies. If your development staff is aware of this possibility it can influence the way they implement and save you costs and implementation frustrations in the future.

Be the fortune teller for your company. Save pain, cost and frustration by thinking a bit about the likely evolution of your product and company at the time of requirement authoring.