How do you effectively extract customer needs and turn them into a product solution without burying your team in complex and rigid process? The key focus areas of requirements engineering and how to get consistently good results with minimal process overhead will be discussed. The essence of the requirements elicitation methods and what you can do to ensure that you extract the customer's true needs will be covered. Also we will look at requirements development basics and a simple approach to ensuring you don't miss anything in the process of turning customer needs into a product solution. The appropriate use of checklists and 'simple' flow diagrams can vastly improve the effectiveness of your requirements activities. The premise is: if you can't capture the heart of a process or method in less than 3 pages then you don't understand it well enough to be explaining it to others.