A business analyst has been asked to use Claude to extract requirements from a recorded...

Under the objective Create effective prompts for business and technical tasks , prompting Claude for complex analysis requires clear framing, explicit task decomposition, and structural schema constraints.

Transcripts from 90-minute interviews contain unstructured, conversational discussions spanning multiple priorities, assumptions, and debates. Providing the raw source material alongside a structured schema—specifying categories such as must-haves, nice-to-haves, unresolved open questions, and stakeholder conflicts (Option A)—enables Claude to parse and categorize information accurately without losing critical context. In contrast, forcing a single flat list (Option B) flattens priority nuances and obscures conflicts. Summarizing first (Option C) introduces unnecessary loss of detail and risks compounding omissions in the second pass. Parsing every statement containing a verb (Option D) creates extreme token noise and unworkable overhead.