[iamcasen]

Collaboration is absolutely required when the product is undefined. You as an engineer would not be able to do your job correctly unless you could communicate with a designer, a UX-researcher, a product manager, etc (unless of course you are talented enough to fulfill all of those roles by yourself).

Quite typically, communication between all of the above parties is required quite often, as snags are discovered along the way and they constantly require re-working and tweaking the original concept.