From Vague Request to Shipped Feature

"Can you build a feature that does X?" Every developer has heard this. What follows determines whether the feature ships smoothly or becomes a months-long negotiation with reality.

The gap between stakeholder intent and technical implementation is where projects fail. Not from bad code-from building the wrong thing. Companies that ship reliably close this gap before sprinting, not after.

The Problem with Starting Immediately

It feels productive. The stakeholder explains, the developer nods, coding begins. A week later: "That's not what I meant." Two weeks later: "What about this edge case?" A month later: the feature is 80% rewritten.

This pattern is everywhere. Not because people are bad at communication-because translating business intent to technical spec is genuinely hard. It requires explicit effort.

What "Ready to Build" Actually Looks Like

Before starting any significant feature, get clarity on five things:

1. The outcome, not the output

"Build a reporting dashboard" is an output. "Reduce time-to-decision from 3 days to 4 hours" is an outcome. Outcomes are measurable. They tell you when to stop iterating and move on.

2. The operational envelope

What are the constraints? Expected data volume, latency requirements, uptime SLA, privacy/compliance needs. These shape technical decisions. A dashboard for 10 users is architecturally different from one for 10,000.

3. The edge cases

Happy path is easy. What happens when an external service is down? When the user submits invalid data? When the process is half-completed and abandoned? Every glossed-over edge case becomes a production bug.

4. The integration contract

What does this feature consume? What does it produce? Endpoints, events, data formats-document them before building. This is the handshake between frontend and backend, between your service and others.

5. The rollout plan

How do we deploy safely? Feature flags, gradual rollout, rollback path. How do we know it's working? Metrics, alerts, dashboards. This isn't an afterthought-it's part of the spec.

The Documentation Takes Hours, Not Days

This isn't waterfall. It's not a 50-page spec. For most features:

• A one-pager with outcome, constraints, and key decisions
• API contract sketch (schema or even pseudocode)
• List of known edge cases and how they're handled
• Success criteria: what metrics move if this works

Time investment: 2-4 hours. Time saved: 2-4 weeks of rework.

Why Engineers Should Drive This

In many teams, product managers own requirements. But the best outcomes happen when engineers push back and ask clarifying questions. "What happens when...?" "How do we measure success?" "What's the priority between these constraints?"

This isn't scope creep-it's scope clarity. The alternative is discovering ambiguity during code review or, worse, in production.

The Iteration Loop

Requirements aren't static. They evolve as you learn. The goal isn't perfect upfront specification-it's explicit shared understanding that updates as context changes.

Document → Build → Learn → Update document → Iterate.

The document is a living artifact, not a contract. But without it, there's no shared reference point when priorities shift.

The Payoff

Teams that invest in requirement clarity ship faster, not slower. Less rework, fewer surprises, smoother handoffs. The feature that takes one team three months takes another team three weeks-not because they code faster, but because they build the right thing the first time.