[pinaceae]

"The product side needs to provide a set of requirements, and the development side needs to find out what the client needs, and how to deliver it. The development side has to have enough product knowledge to determine the actual need, not the stated want"

disagree with that statement.

"The product side needs to find out what the client really needs and build requirements out of it. The development side has to determine how to deliver it."

Fixed that for you.

[jwmaiden]

Working with Product is never that clear cut. Sometimes they need to be prodded to come up with exact requirements.

[j_baker]

See? Now you're going back to "engineer is a dumb machine who translates other peoples' thoughts into code" land. Reality is more like this:

"The sales side figures out what customers claim they can't live without. The product side figures out how to turn those perceived needs into a product. Development figures out how to make it meet with reality."

[sanderjd]

You're both being far too black-and-white or even adversarial - the jobs of both the product and development teams is to talk to each other to determine how to realistically make the product that the customers want.