[jamil7]

If you’re leading an engineering team in a product company you should absolutely be asking why and trying to find the actual problem that’s often buried amongst solutions that are brought to you from the customer or product or sales. This is how you deliver faster, cheaper and simpler solutions.

[devjab]

What often happens, however, is that when a customer asks for a new bathroom. Engineering will point out that they won’t need it in a year because the customers children at moving out age. Not considering that both the customer and product is well aware of this and their motivation is completely different.

Even if your engineering department is quick to accept that, it’ll be a waste of everyone’s time that engineering chose not to trust their own organisation to be good at their jobs. Leading to a rift between software engineering (and IT in general) and the rest of the organisation. This eventually leads to IT not understanding why departments start buying their software systems from 3rd parties, or why nobody in management will listen to them.

It’s the job of engineering to point out that adding that bathroom will require a massive rebuild to preserve the integrity of the structure of the house. It’s not their job to tell product that product actually doesn’t want what they are asking for.

[jamil7]

I think in the scenario you’re presenting the engineering team has failed to surface the problem or the other teams have failed to accurately present it. I do agree with what you’re saying about engineering teams becoming bottlenecks if their immediate instinct is to derail or mistrust other teams and once the cycle has started it’s hard for the teams involved to break out of this pattern. I do still think there is a responsibility for engineering teams, especially at small companies to look for opportunities to solve problems in a simpler or cheaper way if they can and that might not be obvious to other teams. The customer might have actually just needed a sink or second toilet for example.

[devjab]

This is where the less than premium options come into play isn’t it? You can present product with a plan of what they want, and the consequences and cost. You should also present them with other options, which could be an extra toilet or sink. Then you let product and the customer decide if they actually want the full thing or not.