As your company gears up to start the next software release, a Product Manager reaches the point where carefully crafted requirements are ready to submit to the Engineering team. The Product Manager holds a long meeting with Engineering to review each and every requirement.

Holding this meeting feels a lot like watching the beloved little lambs you have shepherded so carefully all go marching off into the slaughterhouse. It’s as if each requirement were scrutinized, chopped up into little pieces, and swept into the trash one by one. But like Darwin’s natural selection process, this is an event that, while sometimes cruel, leaves the strong still standing to survive and thrive.

The trick is to understand that like natural selection, it’s, well, only natural that a lot of the ideas you propose won’t make it to the high priority pile, and from there to the product development plan. Read on below for a sampling of what gets said as requirements are debated and given the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down.