Wishes
Everything about the wish system — how wishes work, what makes a good wish, voting, acceptance criteria, and advanced features.
Wishes
Wishes are the core currency of SpecGraph. Every requirement, concern, enhancement request, and question that a department submits becomes a wish. Understanding how wishes work in depth will help you get the most out of the platform.
Anatomy of a Wish
Every wish has the following fields:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | A short, action-oriented summary (e.g., "Support SSO login via SAML 2.0") |
| Description | A full explanation of the requirement, its context, and why it matters to the department |
| Type | Feature Request, Enhancement, Concern, or Question |
| Priority | Critical, High, Medium, or Low |
| Effort | Small, Medium, Large, or Extra Large |
| Budget Impact | None, Low, Medium, or High |
| Department | Automatically set to the submitting department |
| PRD Section | The section of the PRD this wish relates to (optional but recommended) |
| Phase | Whether this wish applies to the current scope or a future phase |
Writing Good Wishes
The quality of the unification and conflict detection steps depends heavily on the quality of wishes. Well-written wishes are:
Specific — "We need audit logging for all data export operations to meet our SOC 2 Type II compliance requirements" is far more useful than "We need security features."
Scoped to one requirement — if a department has five requirements, they should submit five separate wishes, not one wish listing five things. This allows each requirement to be discussed, voted on, and incorporated individually.
Honest about priority — resist the temptation to mark everything as Critical. Accurate priority settings help the team make better trade-off decisions.
Tied to a PRD section — linking a wish to the relevant PRD section helps the AI during conflict detection and unification.
Viewing Wishes
From the Wishes page of any project, you can see all wishes submitted across all departments. Use the filters to narrow down:
- By Type — show only Feature Requests, Concerns, etc.
- By Department — view what a specific team submitted.
- By Priority — focus on Critical and High items first.
- By Status — see which wishes have been incorporated, rejected, or are pending.
Each wish card shows the title, department color dot, type badge, priority badge, vote count, and the number of comments.
Wish Voting
Any team member with project access can vote on any wish. Votes signal support for a requirement across the organization, independent of which department submitted it.
Voting is particularly valuable for:
- Cross-department alignment — if Engineering submits a wish and Design votes on it, it shows the requirement has broader support.
- Prioritization — the project lead can sort wishes by vote count to see which requirements have the most organizational momentum.
- Conflict resolution — during conflict resolution, high-vote wishes carry more weight in the decision-making process.
To vote on a wish, click the thumbs-up icon on any wish card. You can also remove your vote by clicking again.
Wish Dependencies and Grouping
When wishes are closely related or one requires another to be included, contributors can link wishes together. Linked wishes appear as a group in the wish list, making it clear to the team that these requirements come as a package.
The AI respects wish groupings during unification — if a set of linked wishes is incorporated, they're treated as a unit rather than individually.
Thematic Clustering
SpecGraph can automatically group wishes into themes using AI. Click Cluster Wishes on the Wishes page to see how wishes naturally group into categories (e.g., "Security & Compliance", "User Experience", "Performance"). This is useful for large projects with many wishes, helping the team spot patterns and see which themes dominate the requirements landscape.
Acceptance Criteria
For any wish, you can generate acceptance criteria — specific, testable conditions that define when the requirement has been met. Acceptance criteria use the Given/When/Then format:
- Given — the initial context or precondition.
- When — the action the user takes.
- Then — the expected outcome.
Click Generate Criteria on any wish to have the AI draft acceptance criteria based on the wish description. You can edit the generated criteria before saving.
Acceptance criteria from wishes are included in the project export, giving the development team clear, testable conditions for each requirement.
Conditional and Phased Wishes
Some requirements only apply under certain conditions or are intentionally scoped for a later phase. Wishes can be flagged as:
- Conditional — the requirement only applies if a specific other decision is made (e.g., "If we choose a microservices architecture, we need a service mesh").
- Phase 2 — the requirement is acknowledged but intentionally deferred to a future version.
Phased wishes are tracked and included in the project record but are excluded from the current unification cycle.
Wish Impact Preview
Before unification, you can preview how a set of wishes would affect the PRD. Select one or more wishes and click Preview Impact to see an AI-generated preview of how those requirements would change each PRD section. This is useful for understanding the scope implications of a wish before committing to it.