I’m becoming really frustrated working with my current project. It’s like someone’s dog ate the requirements and all stakeholders are on a different page on what’s needed/wanted. I’m fishing for the info I need and try to decipher the vagueness I get. I know I could just call a meeting and try to get us all on the same page there - but I’ve been in a few meetings with this specific lot of people, and I know it’s just going to end up in much more confusion...

Yeah sometimes a meeting is misinterpreted as "come and bring me your laundry list of garbage" by some.

@N00bPancakes that, too. But in this case I think it’s more about cultural differences. I know not everyone understands the technical aspects of the requirements, but it’d be nice to be able to establish the required functionality and clear up some issues that provide confusion atm, but gorramn some of them stakeholders can be so vague in everything they say it just doesn’t take us anywhere. Only to the false assumption that we’re nearly done.

PM at my last job on a project I wasn't involved in (fortunately) told the team that they needed to implement this fully custom video chat system with vague requirements. It was a feature that needed to be demo-ready in a month, on top of other features and fixes in the pipeline. They managed to get it done in time, did the presentation, only to realize that the PM just decided on their own that this would be something useful and the client refused to pay for it, then they tried to play it off as "I don't know why the team did this."

No, this really happened.