Each contract specialist, lawyer, engineer, systems engineer, manager, or anyone else involved in the transition of vision into product, has his or her own definition of a requirement. With the rare exception, all are applicable and meaningful – but most are forgotten or ignored in the crunch to produce an effective requirements document under constrained schedule and funding environments. Yet, the need for effective requirements generation is probably the number one priority today in product development needs. Rather than approaching this problem from the theoretical or apriori standpoint, this paper examines the nature of a requirement through a process of identifying key characteristics and relationships from the viewpoint of the requirements manager/analyst and the requirements user (design team). It also discusses the importance of determining that requirements convey a need (as opposed to a directed solution), and ascertaining quality in terms of contextual adequacy.