title: "Navigating the Tech Maze: A Non-Developer's Take on Evaluating Requirements" date: "2024-05-15" excerpt: "Ever feel lost trying to figure out if product needs and engineering plans actually make sense? Turns out, there are quiet corners of the web offering a different kind of support. Let's talk about one that caught my eye."
Navigating the Tech Maze: A Non-Developer's Take on Evaluating Requirements
You know that feeling? The one where you've poured over a product requirement document, felt genuinely good about outlining what the user needs, the problem we're solving, the whole nine yards... and then it hits the engineering team. And the feedback comes back. Or maybe it doesn't come back clearly, which is somehow worse. You're left wondering: Is what I'm asking for even technically feasible in a reasonable timeframe? Are the tasks they've broken it down into... right? Or are they missing something huge? Or maybe inflating the effort?
If you're not steeped in code or system architecture yourself, this gap can feel like a chasm. You're the bridge between the user/business and the builders, but sometimes you feel like you're standing on one side, shouting across a canyon you can't quite see the bottom of. How do you, as someone without a tech background, even begin to evaluate product requirements from a technical standpoint? How can you check if product requirements are reasonable? And when the engineers present their plan, their engineer task breakdown, how do you get a sense if that looks like a realistic path, or a potential rabbit hole?
For years, it was mostly tribal knowledge, relying on trusted engineers who could translate, or painful trial and error (mostly error). You'd learn to spot patterns, maybe pick up a few buzzwords, but a true, objective gut check felt out of reach. You were essentially flying blind when it came to technical feasibility check for product managers or trying to understand engineer estimates.
This is where I started poking around lately, looking for tools that aren't aimed at developers building software, but at people like us – product managers, business analysts, designers – who need to understand the build process better to do our jobs effectively. I stumbled onto a little tool recently, designed explicitly to help non technical evaluate tech requirements.
The idea is simple, almost deceptively so. You feed it your requirements, or perhaps the proposed break down product tasks for engineering, and it gives you some feedback on the technical implications and the proposed effort. It's like having a basic sanity check layer, a quick way to validate engineering effort from a high level, without needing to deep dive into code yourself.
What makes something like this stand out? It's not the flashiest thing in the world, and it's certainly not going to replace a good engineering conversation. But it's the intent behind it. It acknowledges that the communication breakdown between non-technical and technical teams is a fundamental, costly problem. It tries to simplify technical requirements for non developers by giving you a different lens.
It's not about turning you into an engineer overnight. It's about giving you a structured way to think about the reasonableness of a request or a plan. Does this feature require integrating with a notoriously difficult legacy system? Does this task breakdown account for potential data migration headaches? These are questions a tool like this can prompt you to consider, or flag potential complexities that might otherwise sail right over your head.
For anyone wrestling with making sure engineer tasks are realistic or just trying to bridge that communication gap, exploring tools like this feels like a necessary step. It's a quiet evolution in how we collaborate, offering a little more clarity in that sometimes-fuzzy space between what we want to build and how we can realistically build it. It’s one less blind spot, which, in my book, is always a step in the right direction.