Niels-Ole Kühl & Tamer El-Hawari
This article is for technical oriented product managers who have their specifications critiqued as “not detailed enough” by developers. This article may help you solve that problem.
Dear Mom,
as you know I am a product manager and part of my job is writing technical specifications(referred to as “specs”). I think about what our users expect from our software and then make easily understandable documents for developers on how everything should work.
This job can be pretty hard, because I need to anticipate all edge cases and think of solutions before handing it over to IT. It happens quite often that developers complain about missing details. In order to solve that problem I tried to add more details or used different approaches like user stories, jobs to be done, gherkin specs — and paradoxically this happened: The more details I provide the more details are being requested.
I ended up thinking that it would be faster if I code it myself directly — but i was not hired for coding. So how do I provide these details the developers need? I don’t.
After a while I figured out what was wrong. I always thought of specs to be a complete blueprint for the development covering all edge cases and providing solutions for the implementation. But this approach does not work out, as only code itself can be a perfect specification. I was never missing details but rather a tool for developers to make their own decisions when they come to a point where things are not specified.
The easiest way to provide this tool is to let everyone follow my thoughts to make my decisions comprehensible. In that case the developer would take the same train of thoughts that will lead him to a decision that I would be comfortable with.
Thank you!
If you explain something technical to your mom you usually don’t expect technical expertise (certainly true for most moms) and therefore give a good overview. This leads to the idea of writing “to your mom” to not miss on basic assumptions that are very clear for you but eventually unknown to others. Mom get’s you grounded when you start writing.
We call it the Dear Mom Paradigm. It’s an approach to write specs in a way that enables developers to make their own decisions confidently. It complements with our approach of writing specs with user stories.
The result is that developers are much more independent and are able to make their own decisions on implementation details.
