requirements engineering | business analysis | elicitation | user stories | acceptance criteria | BPMN | BRD | BABOK
What You Will Learn:
- Turn a vague request into a stated problem with a goal, a constraint and a metric attached
- Write user stories with acceptance criteria in Given-When-Then form that a developer can build from
- Run an elicitation interview with STAR questions and get past what someone thinks they want
- Facilitate a requirements workshop where stakeholders with different needs leave with one prioritised list
- Design a survey that produces usable requirements rather than a list of everybody’s preferences
- Model AS-IS and TO-BE processes in BPMN and use the gap between them as the requirement set
- Prioritise by value against effort and defend the ordering to both business and technical sides
- Run impact analysis on a change request instead of accepting it and discovering the cost later
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author’s experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
The “Order-Taker” Trap and How This Course Breaks It
Let’s be honest: most people in tech think they’re doing requirements engineering when they’re actually just taking dictation from stakeholders who don’t know what they want. I’ve spent over a decade in the trenches, and the biggest project killers aren’t bad code—they are vague requests and the “feature factory” mindset. Mike’s course, Requirements Engineering: Elicitation and User Stories, is a direct response to this chaos.
What I appreciated most isn’t just the theory; it’s the shift in perspective. The course moves you away from being a passive recipient of “to-do lists” and turns you into a strategic partner. It’s grounded in the reality of working at high-stakes companies like Wargaming and Preply, where a single misunderstood requirement can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead of dryly reciting the BABOK guide, the content focuses on the messy, human side of tech—how to navigate conflicting egos in a workshop and how to translate “I want a button that does everything” into a stated problem with a measurable metric attached. If you’re tired of being the middleman between confused business units and frustrated developers, this is the toolkit you’ve been looking for.
Prerequisites
You don’t need a computer science degree or a decade of experience to get value here. This course is designed for anyone who sits between the business and the build. However, having a basic understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) will help the concepts stick faster. If you’ve ever felt the pain of a project scope creeping out of control, you’re perfectly positioned to start. It’s accessible for beginners but offers enough “war stories” to keep senior professionals engaged.
Skills & Tools
This isn’t just a series of lectures; it’s a deep dive into hands-on labs and industry-standard tools. You will master:
- BPMN 2.0 Modeling: Learning to map AS-IS and TO-BE processes to find the “gap” that actually defines the requirement.
- Gherkin Syntax: Writing user stories and acceptance criteria in the Given-When-Then (GWT) format that developers can actually use for automated testing.
- STAR Interviewing: Using behavioral interviewing techniques to dig past what stakeholders *think* they want to find the actual pain point.
- Prioritization Frameworks: Defending your roadmap by weighing business value against technical effort using objective data.
- Impact Analysis: How to handle change requests without derailing the entire sprint.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
Investing in these job-ready skills is one of the fastest ways to see career growth in the current market. We are seeing a massive surge in demand for professionals who can bridge the communication gap in Agile environments. This course serves as excellent certification prep for those eyeing the ECBA, CCBA, or CBAP designations.
Completing this curriculum prepares you for high-paying roles such as:
- Business Analyst (BA): Move from junior to senior by mastering complex elicitation.
- Product Owner (PO): Learn to manage backlogs with actual data rather than gut feelings.
- Systems Analyst: Bridge the gap between business logic and technical implementation.
- Project Manager: Better manage stakeholder expectations and reduce scope creep.
Pros
- Real-World Projects: The course uses scenarios that feel like actual office politics and technical hurdles, not sanitized textbook examples. You’re learning from someone who has navigated enterprise-level digital transformations.
- The Gherkin Mastery: Most people write terrible user stories. The focus on acceptance criteria in GWT format ensures your requirements are “Ready for Development,” which will make you the favorite person on any engineering team.
- Psychological Edge: The sections on facilitating requirements workshops and managing “difficult” stakeholders are worth the price of admission alone. It teaches you how to get a room full of people with different agendas to agree on one prioritized list.
- Practical Prioritization: The framework for defending your backlog against both pushy executives and skeptical developers is a game-changer for anyone in a leadership position.
Cons
If I have one honest critique, it’s that the BPMN modeling section can feel a bit daunting for true beginners. While the “gap analysis” method is the industry-standard way to identify requirements, mastering the nuance of process flow diagrams takes more practice than a single course can provide. You’ll likely need to supplement this with your own real-world projects to truly feel fluid in complex process mapping.