This is the capstone lesson of Part I, and it produces the Part I deliverable: requirements document v1. Everything students learned about the profession, the warehouse, and reading a floor now points at one skill, running a discovery conversation well enough that the answers are usable. The one outcome every student must leave with: discovery is a conversation you steer, not a checklist you read. Don't lecture the six categories. Put students in the chair and make them run the conversation live.
| Segment | Min | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Open on the answer | 5 | Read Dana's Scene 3 answer aloud: throughput, volume split, product, building, all in one pass. Ask the room why she gave up that much that cleanly. Steer them to the cause: the engineer asked for all of it and gave her room. The answer traces to the question. |
| How to show up | 7 | The five habits: prepared, curious, honest about what you don't know, reading automation appetite, never solving in the room. Keep it fast. Land the reframe: the questions are the credential, not a sign you're green. |
| Roleplay the first question | 12 | Key teaching moment, below. A student plays Dana. You, then a student, open with "what made you reach out to us?" versus "what do you need?" and the room watches the two answers diverge. This is the center of the lesson. Do not cut it. |
| The six categories | 11 | Walk all six with their killer questions. Stress category 2 carriers by shipment type and category 4 as names only, the WMS and ERP deep dive comes later, in Part V. Warn against reading them as a list. Run them as a conversation. |
| Requirements document and the review ritual | 12 | Walk the ten-section structure. Then teach the review ritual below: you read the document back to the customer and get sign-off before design. Land the line: a customer who approves it has agreed to a shared understanding. That's scope control. |
| 3W and watch-fors | 6 | Run the Three W's on the discovery conversation. Surface the interrogation failure mode from the watch-fors and name it out loud before the Riverside build. |
| Riverside and close | 7 | Facilitation below. Students draft requirements document v1 in their Riverside note from everything gathered across Part I. Collect it. This is the Part I deliverable. |
| Total | 60 | Baseline session. Expand with the stretch options below if you have 90 minutes. |
Pick a student to play Dana. Give them the Scene 3 picture to work from so they have real answers to give. Now run it twice. First, you open the discovery with "what do you need?" Let the student-as-Dana answer the way most customers do, by naming a fix: a conveyor, a sorter, a faster line. Then reset and open with "what made you reach out to us?" and watch the answer change into a story about pain: the misdirects, the chargebacks, the staging bottleneck at peak.
Put both answers on the board side by side. The first got you a product. The second got you a problem you can engineer against. Then hand the chair to a student and make them open a cold discovery with the better question in front of the room. A student who has said "what made you reach out to us?" out loud, to a live person, and felt the conversation open up, owns it in a way no slide can teach.
The failure mode this lesson exists to prevent is interrogation-style questioning: a student firing the six categories at a customer like a form to be completed. It gets facts and kills the relationship. Watch for it and break it. Signs:
Teach the sign-off as a ritual, not a formality, because it's where discovery converts into protection. After discovery, you write the requirements document, then you sit back down with the customer and read it back to them, section by section. You are asking one question the whole time: did I get this right? Every correction they make in that meeting is a correction you didn't have to make on the floor later.
The ritual buys two things. It catches the gap between what the customer meant and what you heard while it's still cheap to fix. And once they've signed off, you've got one written record of the problem to reach for, calmly, the day the scope moves in month four. Have a student read a mock section back to you and correct it live so they feel how it runs.
This is the Part I payoff. Students have gathered Riverside material across four lessons: the voicemail, Dana's operational picture, their own read of the floor, and the throughput, volume-split, product, and building answers from this lesson. Now they assemble it. Give them quiet time to draft requirements document v1 in their Riverside note, walking the ten-section structure and filling every section they can.
What separates the strong drafts is honesty about the holes. Riverside has real gaps at this stage: exact product data is a promised WMS report, shift detail is thin, and the business objectives and payback belong to Tom and haven't been pulled yet. A student who invents numbers to fill those sections missed the lesson. One who writes them into Open Questions understood it. Grade the completeness and the honesty of the Open Questions, not the polish.
Requirements document v1 is the first big document in the project folder, and this is where the easter egg you've been quietly seeding since Lesson 1 starts to pay off. The students who kept dated, organized Riverside notes across Part I will assemble a real deliverable in minutes today. The ones who didn't will feel the cost of scrambling. Let that contrast land on its own. Don't rescue the scramblers by handing out a template.
Keep it hidden. Do not tell them this document becomes a running artifact they'll carry and grow through the whole program, or that the capstone leans on the folder they're building now. Just keep treating the organized project note as normal professional practice. The students who trusted the habit without being told why are the ones it pays back hardest.