title: "Trying to Grasp Technical Requirements? When Product Meets Engineering's Reality." date: "2024-07-29" excerpt: "Ever felt lost trying to figure out if an engineering estimate makes sense? Or if those product requirements are actually buildable? There's a common chasm non-technical folks face, and sometimes, you just need a little help crossing it."
Trying to Grasp Technical Requirements? When Product Meets Engineering's Reality.
You've poured over the product requirements. You've painted the picture, outlined the user flows, explained the 'why.' Then it hits the engineering team, and back comes... well, something that might look like a foreign language. Estimates that seem too high (or maybe too low?), task breakdowns that feel overly complex, or perhaps a quiet uncertainty about whether the whole thing is even feasible as you envisioned it.
If you're on the product side, or really, anywhere not elbow-deep in code and architecture diagrams, bridging that gap between your vision and the technical path to get there can feel like a constant challenge. How do you, as a non-technical person, evaluate engineering tasks? How do you get a handle on whether the proposed solution aligns with the requirement, or if the engineer task breakdown evaluation they've presented is genuinely reasonable?
It's not about second-guessing competence. Not at all. It's about shared understanding. It's about ensuring everyone's on the same page regarding scope, complexity, and potential pitfalls before you're deep into development. It's about making sure your product requirement analysis holds up to the cold light of technical implementation.
I've spent time navigating this space, seen the friction points firsthand. That moment when you're looking at a detailed technical plan and thinking, "Okay, but is this really the simplest way to achieve X?" or "Given requirement Y, does this estimate feel right?" You need some way to get an objective perspective, a tool to help you perform a product requirements review for non-engineers.
That's where things like specialized tools come into play. I've been exploring one that aims to help with just this – specifically designed, it seems, for folks who aren't steeped in the engineering world but need to make sense of it. The idea is that it can take those product requirements and proposed technical tasks and offer an assessment. Think of it as a sanity check layer. Can it help in checking product requirement feasibility? Potentially. Can it shed light on whether the way engineers are breaking down product requirements for engineers seems logical or proportional? That's the promise.
The goal isn't to replace the engineer's expertise. Far from it. It's about empowering the non-technical side of the equation to ask better questions, to understand the implications of decisions, and to feel more confident in the joint planning process. It’s about getting a handle on assessing technical estimates without needing to understand every line of code or database structure.
Ultimately, anything that helps bridge gap between product and engineering is worth looking at. Because when those two sides communicate more effectively, when there’s a shared framework for understanding the technical journey, that’s when products get built better, faster, and with fewer unexpected headaches down the line. It makes you think about those moments you've questioned, silently or aloud, are engineering estimates reasonable? and whether there's a smarter way to approach that conversation. This feels like a step in that direction.