Interviews — the discipline
Open-ended questions, not leading ones. "Tell me about the last time you tried to do X" not "would you use a feature that does X?" The worst requirements come from asking customers what they want; the best come from asking what they did. People are reliable narrators of their past, terrible predictors of their future.
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
JTBD reframes the question: instead of "what does this user want?" ask "what job is this user hiring our product to do?" A spreadsheet might be hired to track expenses, model a forecast, or organize wedding seating — those are different jobs that look identical on the surface. JTBD surfaces the underlying progress the user is trying to make.
— Theodore Levitt, paraphrased
User stories — the output format
The classic format: "As a [user], I want [capability], so that [outcome]." The third clause is the part new PMs drop. Without it, you're just listing features. With it, the team can make sensible trade-offs because they know what the story is for.
Patton's User Story Mapping (2014) extends this into 2D: stories arranged horizontally as a user journey, then vertically by priority. The map shows the whole story at once — which is harder to do with a flat backlog.