The need under the request

Some requests are disguised as something smaller than they are.

A customer who asks for a document is rarely asking for words. What is wanted is something closer to a promise made durable, some proof that the thing being described exists, behaves as claimed, and will still behave that way next quarter, when the person’s own reputation is riding on it having worked.

There is an old and useful habit, in mathematics, of asking not merely whether a statement is true but whether it can be relied upon, whether the proof holds under the scrutiny a stranger might bring to it.

Documents remain useful and are often exactly what is needed. This is only a reminder that the words of a request are a translation, made under some pressure, of a need that is usually simpler and more urgent than the words themselves: the need to trust that something is real. Hearing that need, underneath the words asking for it, seems to me a great deal of what good product work actually consists of. Answering it is what people mean, I suspect, when they say a thing has actually shipped, as opposed to merely having been built.