In this video I kick off Phase 1 of “PCB Design for Industry,” and I’m telling you straight: meeting the requirements is the most important part of any PCB or hardware product. Everything hinges on initial planning—defining your mission, your scope, and your design requirements in a way that actually works for teams and industry. This isn’t a “play board” process. This is the big leagues where reliability, safety, and business realities matter, and where missing requirements means rework, delays, and a product that doesn’t match what the company needs. I walk through how I think about requirements in real terms: what the product must do for the user (communication, portability, environmental operating range, etc.), and how quickly those bullet points explode once you consider real-world deployment (regions, climates, bands, regulations). Then I cover tools I use to capture and manage this: Miro and Mural for high-level mind mapping, Trello and Jira for tracking tasks and docs, and even the classic notebook + meetings. I also highlight Altium Develop’s Requirements portal as a hardware-focused way to link requirements to schematics and track verification. Finally, I explain why block diagrams are basically your early schematic stage—boxes and requirements first, then circuits to fulfill them.