The Forward Deployed Engineer

Chapter 2. Technical Discovery and Scoping: Writing the Spec for a Customer Who Cannot

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Learning objective: be able to extract what a customer needs when they cannot tell you, turn it into a statement of work they will sign, win the design review before you write a line of code, and make the scoping calls, including the call to build nothing, under commercial and political constraints you do not control.

The most common complaint in software is some version of the same sentence: they do not know what they want. Every engineer has said it. About a product manager, a stakeholder, a client, a manager. In most engineering jobs the complaint has a safety net under it. Someone else’s title says requirements, and when the requirements are wrong, the miss is at least shared. On an engagement there is no net. The requirements live inside a customer who cannot articulate them, no document exists, and the person responsible for turning that silence into a spec is you. The requirements are not yours to ...