Chapter 10

Intent and product engineering

Product engineering, requirements engineering, user experience, design and user interviews are one subject: some system by which developers work out with domain experts what to build and why, before anything is said about how to achieve it in code. Tickets and user stories are its artifacts; the specifics of any one workflow are out of scope. The chapter argues that its shape is determined by the distance between engineer and consumer – zero, when building for oneself, collapses into thinking; short, when building for developers, needs only imagination; large distance is a fundamental shift, demanding direct contact or middlemen, and every middleman is another encode-decode hop with loss. That this work is a huge cost driver in most organisations, when it should reduce the cost of authoring, is accidental rather than essential, and the remedy is fewer hops rather than more ceremony.