Why Your Product Specs Keep Coming Back with Surprises
A spec that looks complete to a founder almost always has three or four critical gaps that only surface when engineers start building. Not because engineers are difficult — because founders describe outcomes, and engineers build processes. That translation is where surprises hide.
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Transcript
You write a spec. You think it's complete. Engineering comes back two weeks later with a list of questions. This isn't a communication failure — it's a translation problem. Founders write outcomes. Engineers build processes. The gaps between those two things are predictable. And they're fixable.
A spec travels through several stages before it becomes working software. It starts as a founder document, gets reviewed against the design, becomes a technical spec, then moves into implementation. That translation chain is where gaps open up. Each stage adds precision. But precision also reveals what wasn't there in the first place. The gap doesn't show up until someone tries to build it.
Four gap types come up again and again. Edge cases that weren't in the spec — what happens when a user does something unexpected? Integration assumptions — specs often assume an API works a certain way. It doesn't. Performance — the spec says "fast," but fast isn't a requirement. And error handling — what does the product do when something goes wrong? Most specs don't say. Add these four things to every spec you write and you'll cut your surprise rate in half.