Your Developers Aren't Mind Readers.

When a build goes wrong, the conversation often turns to the developers. They misunderstood. They over-engineered. They asked too many questions, or not enough. It is a convenient story because it leaves the rest of the organisation untouched.

Developers are not mind readers. They cannot infer a process that has never been agreed. They cannot prioritise requirements that were never written. They cannot test acceptance criteria that exist only as a feeling in a stakeholder’s head. If the business cannot describe what it needs — and what it is willing to give up — the delivery team is being asked to invent the organisation as they go.

This is not a plea for more documentation for its own sake. It is a plea for a shared sentence. What problem are we solving? For whom? What does done look like? Who decides when two needs collide? Those questions sound basic. They are the ones that, left unanswered, generate the most expensive rework.

The gap between “the business” and “technology” is rarely a personality clash. It is a translation failure. People who do the work speak in exceptions and relationships. People who build systems need boundaries, states, and rules. Someone has to stand in the middle and make those two languages meet — before a line of code is treated as a commitment.

If your developers keep coming back with questions, that is not obstruction. That is the sound of ambiguity being discovered in public. It is cheaper to answer those questions in a workshop than in a release. It is cheaper still to have answered them before anyone was asked to estimate.

Give people a problem that is understood. Give them requirements that can be traced to that problem. Then they can build. Until then, you are asking them to guess — and punishing them when the guess is not what you meant.