How do you handle unclear or ambiguous business requirements before you start coding?

Question

Accepted Answer

Coding on a guess is the most expensive way to discover you misunderstood the requirement. When a request is vague, my job is to turn ambiguity into a shared, written understanding *before* writing code, then validate cheaply. Ambiguity is not a blocker to push back on; it's a normal part of the work to drive out.

## How I clear the fog

- **Ask why, not just what.** What outcome are we trying to create? The reason behind a request often reveals a simpler or different solution than the one stated.
- **Find the real user and the success metric.** Who feels the pain, and how will we know it's solved? "Done" needs a definition you can point at.
- **Restate your understanding back.** Paraphrasing it in your own words surfaces mismatches immediately, far cheaper than surfacing them in a demo.
- **Use examples, mockups, and acceptance criteria.** Concrete artifacts force fuzzy ideas to commit. "Given X, when Y, then Z" turns opinions into testable statements.
- **Surface edge cases early.** What about empty states, errors, large inputs, permissions? Asking now is cheap; discovering in production is not.
- **Write it down and confirm.** A short written summary that stakeholders agree to becomes the shared source of truth and the thing you build against.

## Then validate small

- Build the **smallest slice** that proves the understanding, a thin end-to-end path or a quick prototype, and get feedback before investing in the full build. Real software in front of a stakeholder clarifies more than any document.

## Why it matters

Most project failures trace back to building the wrong thing, not to bad code. A tech lead who reliably converts ambiguity into clear, agreed scope saves the team from rework, protects estimates, and earns trust with the business by delivering what was actually needed rather than what was literally said.