mediumScenarioBehaviouralEntryMidSenior
A stakeholder changes their requirements every time you meet them. How do you handle that?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Treat the churn as a symptom and work out which cause you have, because a stakeholder still discovering their own requirements needs concrete artefacts to react to, an unrecorded decision needs a written log, and a proxy who cannot decide needs replacing with someone who can.
In a strong elicitation answer, the stakeholder keeps changing their mind detail should connect the decision to a visible consequence.
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Likely follow-ups
- How would you tell the difference between a stakeholder who is indecisive and one who is being overruled by somebody you have not met?
- What would you change about your elicitation approach if the third version of a rule contradicted the first two?
- At what point does churn stop being an analysis problem and become an escalation?
- How do you keep a developer who has already built the previous version from disengaging?
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