Successful products at least precisely meet the customers’ expectations and, in the best case, exceed them. To develop successful products, customer expectations must be translated into requirements. With the increasing functionalities of products in recent years, the customers’ expectations regarding product interaction and its behavior in different environmental conditions have also become more extensive. Current approaches of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) enable developing complex mechatronic products seamlessly from requirements to functions and solutions on a parameter level. However, there is a lack of approaches that systematically translate complex customer expectations into functional and design requirements as a starting point for further development.In this contribution we present a method and a corresponding meta-model that allows to systematically formalize the dependencies of different stakeholders and their expectations as well as different environmental conditions and constraints. From these dependencies, operating states are elicited that represent a set of simultaneously valid stakeholder expectations with their corresponding constraints. From these operating states, functional and design requirements are systematically derived as a basis for the model-based design of the system under development. Our meta-model is compatible to the established modeling language SysML, thus, existing approaches for the function-oriented model-based system development can benefit directly from these formally modeled requirements.Our publication signposts the potential for systematic and formal translation of customer expectations into operating states as well as requirements and thus enables a targeted, customer-centric and function-oriented development of mechatronic systems. We applied our method in an interdisciplinary, industrial project using the example of a thermal management system of a battery electric vehicle.