Detail drives execution, not autonomy

The dominant failure case that I see in the real world is always, again and again, not enough detail. And it's also the most common failure mode where the engineers run back to the product folks and say, 'I'm not getting enough from you.'

It's shaped if we can give this to a technical person and they say, 'Yeah, I know what to go build now.'

The amount of detail that the team is going to feel helps them is a dial that we can turn that depends on who's on the team. So, if you have a more junior person who's on the build team and then you have a more senior engineer who's involved in the shaping, they can make that junior engineer much more successful with additional detail.

PM should be doing everything in their power to draw the perimeter of the space, of the problem space. And it's within that, eng, design, everyone else that you're working with, they can go as crazy as they want, push up against the bounds and it's fill the box to its maximum capacity, but you've now applied the constraints that allow you to actually have productive conversations.

We never write a ticket. We don't spend much time in linear, which is our ticket management system. Basically, our contract is the vision and the priority and a very high-level spec and everything else is pushed on the engineering teams.