Who Owns the Non‑Functional Story? Turning NFRs into Decisions, Not Arguments

Non-functional requirements live in the shadow of feature requests: everybody assumes them, nobody signs them. In this episode Mirko Peters reframes NFRs—reliability, performance, security, operability, maintainability—as a portfolio of explicit decisions that require owners, trade-offs, and acceptance criteria. Through the lens of business goals and technical constraints, he explains how vague demands become overruns, rework, and blame, and shows a practical path to turn qualitative concerns into measurable policies: priority mapping, decision records, service-level translations, and lightweight acceptance tests. Listeners get concrete scripts to extract business intent, a checklist IT teams can use to propose viable options, and a compact governance pattern that prevents NFRs from becoming permanent debt. This episode is for execs, product managers, architects and engineering leaders who need fewer arguments and more actionable choices when non-functional aspects determine cost, risk, and competitive capability.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.