Engineers Who Wait for Tickets Are Already Too Late

There are tech teams that act like their job starts when the requirements arrive. Still! This is a tech leadership gap created by a tech leader who prefers an agency model instead of a cross-functional model.

Here's what happens with the engineers: Nobody ever told them that they should be asking questions, but they are rewarded for closing tickets. So they wait while a Jira board fills up, they work through it, it empties. By the time a ticket arrives, half the thinking has already happened...without them, usually. The PM figured out what to build, wrote it up, moved on. Engineering shows up to execute on someone else's conclusions.

PMs aren't there to write task lists though. The good ones are carrying commercial context, customer pain, ideas about where the market is going. PMs do have a solid idea on how to solve the problems, but they want someone to think with, not just someone to hand things off to. That's a poor choice in the long term as a PM becomes a bottleneck.

AI is changing what this can look like, in ways I'm still working out. An engineer with a decent model can now mock up a working prototype in the time it takes to write a requirements doc. That changes what "collaborating on the why" actually means.

What I've seen work: before planning, someone drops the last few customer calls into context and asks what problem the team is actually solving. Not what features customers requested. The underlying problem. Takes 20 minutes and tends to surface things the doc missed.

Or an engineer spends a couple of hours building a rough version of one approach before anyone has written a spec. Brings it to the planning session. Now the PM and the engineer are both looking at something real, arguing about what it should actually do, finding the gaps in the assumptions together. That's the collaboration that tends to produce better work. Not waiting for requirements. Getting in before them or at least getting curious before them.