Requirements engineering specialist | Trainer at High Tech Institute | Founder, BA Coach | Co-chair, INCOSE Requirements Working Group
Katarzyna Kot MSc is a Poland-born, Netherlands-based requirements engineering specialist with more than two decades of experience spanning Philips, NXP Semiconductors and consulting work for BAE Aerospace, the European Space Agency and major Dutch financial institutions. She is founder of BA Coach, a requirements engineering and business analysis consultancy, and a trainer at High Tech Institute in Eindhoven, where she teaches Practical Requirements Writing. Since 2024 she has served as co-chair of the INCOSE Requirements Working Group, the international body responsible for developing practical guidance on requirements practice across the systems-engineering community.
Katarzyna arrived in the Netherlands from Poland in 1998 to work at Philips ASA Labs in Eindhoven. What drew her into requirements engineering was discovering, early in her career, what happens in the space before engineers begin to code, design or build. Writing code, designing software and testing products all depend on something earlier: knowing with precision what the system must do, for whom, under what conditions and to what standard. She spent twelve years at Philips and NXP Semiconductors developing that conviction into a specialism, then carried it into consulting work for clients across semiconductor equipment, aerospace, space instrumentation and financial services. She helped to setup and mature the requirements engineering capability at ASML.
The central problem Katarzyna addresses in her teaching is one that every engineer in a multi-disciplinary development project eventually encounters: requirements that are technically present but practically useless. Words like “robust,” “user-friendly” and “portable” appear in specifications across the industry. None of them can be tested. None of them prevent a supplier from delivering something that satisfies the letter of the requirement while missing its intent entirely. Her training teaches engineers to replace those words with measurable, testable attributes: not “the system shall be reliable” but a statement that specifies exactly what failure rate is acceptable, under which conditions, within which timeframe. A good requirement, in her framing, is an artifact documented precisely enough that the contractor can deliver exactly what the customer expects, with no surprises on either side.
Her course is built on the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements, the field’s authoritative reference, and covers the nine characteristics of a good individual requirement and the six characteristics of a good requirement set. It teaches the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS), a structured pattern language for writing requirements that removes ambiguity at the level of sentence construction, and applies that syntax to both system-level and software-level specifications. A recent addition addresses the responsible use of AI tools such as QVscribe, ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot as requirements assistants, with a clear-eyed view of where AI helps and where it falls short: AI can analyze, flag inconsistencies and suggest formulations, but it does not understand context and cannot substitute for an engineer’s judgment about what the system actually needs to do. Participants leave the two days with the ability to write requirements that are testable and structured for reuse across the full systems-engineering lifecycle.
Beyond her HTI teaching, Katarzyna has been a sustained presence in the Dutch and international requirements and business analysis community. In 2010 she co-founded the IIBA Netherlands chapter (International Institute of Business Analysis) and served on its board of directors. In 2012 she led the Devoteam RE Compass research project with IBM Netherlands, producing the first structured study of requirements development maturity across Dutch organizations. Her elevation to co-chair of the INCOSE Requirements Working Group in 2024 places her among the small group of practitioners shaping how requirements engineering is defined, taught and practiced internationally.
At High Tech Institute, Katarzyna Kot teaches:
- Practical Requirements Writing – a two-day hands-on workshop grounded in the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements, covering the nine characteristics of good requirements, the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS), requirements patterns, structuring requirements for reuse and the responsible use of AI as a requirements tool.
What distinguishes her teaching is the combination of more than twenty years of applied requirements engineering experience across multiple sectors with a curriculum grounded in the current INCOSE standard and a concrete, measurable definition of what a good requirement actually looks like on paper.
Katarzyna Kot MSc is founder of BA Coach and a trainer at High Tech Institute in Eindhoven, Netherlands. She has worked in requirements engineering and business analysis for more than two decades. Since 2024 she has served as co-chair of the INCOSE Requirements Working Group.
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