Types of Requirements in Business Analysis: Explained with Real Examples

1. Business Requirements

What it is:

High-level statements of goals, objectives, or needs of the business. They explain why the project is being initiated. It serves as a foundation before diving into technical details.

Purpose:

To provide the business justification and outline the value or benefit expected.

Example:

“Reduce average customer support response time by 30% in the next quarter.”

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2. Stakeholder Requirements

What it is:

Detailed needs and expectations of specific stakeholders (users, customers, executives, etc.).

Purpose:

To bridge the gap between business requirements and solution requirements by capturing individual stakeholder needs.

Example:

“Customer service agents need a dashboard to see pending chat requests in real-time.”

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3. Functional Requirements

What it is:

Describes what the system or product should do — the features, behaviors, and processes.

Purpose:

To define the functionality of the solution — often translated into user stories, use cases, and system specs.

Example:

“The system must allow agents to filter chat requests by customer priority and time in queue.”

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4. Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs)

What it is:

Describes how the system should perform — includes quality attributes like performance, security, scalability, usability, etc.

Purpose:

To define the standards and constraints the system must operate under.

Example:

“The dashboard should load within 2 seconds even with 100 concurrent users.

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Summary

Requirement Type	Focus	Describes	Example
Business Requirement	Why the project exists	Goals & values to the business	“Reduce churn by 20% in 6 months”
Stakeholder Requirement	Who needs what	Needs of people involved	“Sales team wants lead scoring feature”
Functional Requirement	What the system must do	System features/ behaviours	“User Login, Payment processing”
Non - functional requirement	How the system performs	Quality/ Performance/ Security	“System uptime should be 99.99% annually”