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A comment on Dear Client, Here’s Why That Change Took So Long. Parent comment

Re:Dear Client, Here’s Why That Change Took So Long by repolfx on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @05:22AM (#19857186)
Well, because stating needs and not implementations disempowers managers and means they're left with no feeling of grip. It makes it hard to imagine what you'll actually get and whether it'll be useful, which is scary. Plus, what people need is often so vague that literally anyone could have come up with it and it's embarrassingly obvious. If a manager goes to his tech team and says, "I need to make our business more efficient. Think of something!" then this may be the best way to get results because often the programmers understand the business as well as or better than the managers and they understand the codebase, but who would respect a manager who said that? It'd be Dilbert cartoons all over.

This is one reason why tech firms win. Their senior management are made of [former] engineers who are much more aligned with the workers around what implementations make sense.

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Re:Dear Client, Here’s Why That Change Took So Long by jrochkind1 on Wednesday May 08, 2019 @11:06AM (#19859508)
That's why it's an actual skill to translate needs to implementation. It's not one most managers have either, is why when the managers just give you implementation it does not work.

The skill includes working with the stakeholders to develop actionable needs (not just "make our business more efficient"; the obvious place to go from there is, okay, what do we know about where the greatest bottlenecks/inefficiencies are now, if we don't know enough what can we do to learn?).

Also you don't just take needs and come back with a finished feature, you iterate with feedback from the stakeholders. The first iteration might just be a textual description of the feature, to make sure it makes sense to the manager/stakeholder.

It's a skill, and it involves building trust.

But translating needs to features that will succesfully meet those needs is not a skill most managers/stakeholders have either, is exactly why it doesn't work to just get detailed micro-managed implementation directions from managers/stakeholders. (Or customers!).

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