We were agile, we had a Scrum master, we had standup-meetings, we had unit tests, we worked iteratively and met the product owner regularly. We did everything right, except the requirements. When we were almost ready to launch, we suddenly understood that we had missed a critical piece of functionality; namely the complex pricing model. The product owner thought we knew how this should work, but we didn't. This was not a feature that could just be patched onto the application in the end, it took several weeks of restructuring. We might blame the product owner for not communicating this clearly, but we were the software professionals. It's our responsibility to find out what our customers want. Examples What could we have done to avoid this embarrassment? Should we have spent the first month of the project writing requirements? No, I don't think that's the solution. That might have helped, but it would have cost too much. There is a much simpler thing we could have