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The demand for Spanish for specific purposes (SSP) university courses in the United States has prompted widespread curricular change in language departments over the last two decades (Klee, 2015; Sánchez‐López, 2013). However, many instructors lack the tools and training needed to design SSP curricula that meet learners’ communicative needs in such contexts. Moreover, little SSP research to date has taken a task‐based approach to identifying learners’ specialized needs (Long, 2015), which can provide much‐needed support to instructors who are nonexperts in the particular domain of interest. The current study reports on a small‐scale, multiphase needs analysis carried out to design a university business Spanish course. In Phase 1, a small sample of business graduates and professionals generated a list of 40 target tasks in the domains of reading, writing, listening, and speaking that were relevant to …