Ask HN: How to fix stakeholders micromanaging the technical implementation?
How do you resolve a situation where stakeholders (product teams, etc.) are giving you specifications to implement rather than requirements to design solutions for?
Context:
* Joined a new company.
* New major project.
* We have a product manager for our dev team (the platform is our team's product) but he's new.
* All of our requirements coming through him from product contain specific implementation details.
* Talking to other devs, this has been an issue for a while.
* It's creating a ton of churn/confusion.
What we need: "As $USER_TYPE, I want to be able to do $THING in $PRODUCT, so that I can $REASON_THIS_IS_NEEDED."
When we ask why, it turns out that what they're actually trying to accomplish is something else entirely, and could be easily accomplished by an existing component, or shouldn't even be done in the first place.
Talking to our other devs, this is a chronic issue. We've wasted 6 weeks of our project so far because non-engineers have been trying to design engineering solutions that we eventually had to explain weren't necessary/optimal/possible, etc.
I'm not sure I have enough political/social capital to raise the issue directly, and everyone else seems too timid.
Has anyone been here before? What's the right solution?