Last week, someone we met with asked how we manage requirements.
It sounded simple. But the more we thought about it, the more complicated it got.

Most engineering today is requirement-driven. It’s just painfully manual.

Teams spend hours linking specs to models, updating spreadsheets, validating every small change, and making sure traceability is intact before the next review. Every requirement technically guides the work; but it’s work that takes too long.

Requirements are supposed to define what success looks like.
In practice, they’ve become something you have to unfortunately maintain.

People who have managed a complex mechanical systems, tell us the same thing: keeping requirements and CAD in sync is one of the hardest parts of the job. Designs evolve faster than documents. By the time the model is updated, the spreadsheet is already out of date.

So requirement-driven design ends up feeling like a balancing act; engineers building forward while constantly checking backward to make sure the intent still holds.

And when that link breaks, it shows.
A missed tolerance. A validation test that fails because a small assumption changed upstream. Everyone did their job, but the system still drifts.

What we’ve realized is that the problem isn’t that engineers ignore requirements.
It’s that the systems around them make it hard to keep up.

Real requirement-driven design shouldn’t mean manually maintaining links and checklists. It should mean designing with context that’s always there knowing, as you work, what each feature ties back to and what it affects.

That’s the gap we’ve been thinking about.
Not replacing the process, but making it faster to trust.

— Kunal