TABLE OF CONTENTS The basic outlines of the product you are building (the business plan and vision) are clear, and the time has come to write the spec (specification document or documents), get it approved and costed, and then get down to the business of building something. Time pressure is on and decisions have to be made fast. A bad decision can result in an unusable, unuseful, or undesirable (in short, unsellable) product later. There is a sense of needing to both go faster and maintain control of the frenzied activity. Assumptions are mixing with facts, and both are complicated by politics. Everyone is afraid of being a bottleneck, and yet no one has enough information or clarity to make all of the important decisions they have to make.
Once an organization starts to build a product, everyone (or almost everyone) turns from thinking strategically to acting tactically. Everyone can see just a piece of the puzzle, and communication among internal feature teams, organizational roles, and disciplines is both critical and difficult. Often, large groups of people have to work together to make feature and implementation decisions, and no one person in the group can see beyond the one or two pieces of the puzzle that belong to her. Each is responsible for some of the hundreds of daily decisions that affect the customer experience, and each brings a set of (usually implicit) assumptions about the eventual users of the product to bear on...
