I was just watching a video about system engineering and the following stucks:

Stakeholder needs: What people wants to get done with the product

Management needs: How to manage the spending of resources (time, money,…) to create the product

Engineering needs: What is the product

You have to balance the three. Sometimes it’s simple and easy to get right. Sometimes it’s complex enough, you’re never truly sure until the product is out in the wild.

Software is malleable and we can do easily do iterations which is not possible with hardware. But today, we have a skew towards engineering, where the whole focus is to create a solution, whatever that is. No understanding of the problem, no proper allocation of resources, just do something. Even if it is plastering over the crack for the eleventh time.

The stakeholders just want to send emails and excels around, someone in management has a budget for a productivity enhancing tool to replace that and the engineers have a half-baked solution that some sales guys are saying is the second coming.