We have succeeded in streamlining the product development cycle by incorporating object-oriented technology into the requirements definition phase. We have developed a general format, supporting tools and a methodology for describing requirements in an object-oriented fashion. We have validated our approach by incorporating it into the new object-oriented methods being applied to our current project and observing the benefits that resulted. We describe the problems with our earlier requirements specifications which make them unsuitable for developing good object-oriented systems and then explain our approach which eliminates these pitfalls.