"Large, rapidly-moving tech companies are constantly operating in the "fog of war" about their own systems. Simple questions like "can users of type Y access feature X?", "what happens when you perform action Z in this situation?", or even "how many different plans do we offer" often can only be answered by a handful of people in the organization. Sometimes there are zero people at the organization who can answer them,"
"How can this be? Shouldn't the engineers who built the software know what it does? Aren't these answers documented internally? Better yet, aren't these questions trivially answerable by looking at the public-facing documentation for end users? Tech companies are full of well-paid people who know what they're doing. Why aren't those people able to get clear on what their own product does?"
"For instance, the ability to self-host the software, or to trial it for free, or to use it as a large organization with centralized policy controls, or to use it localized in different languages, or to use it in countries with strict laws around how software can operate, or for highly-regulated customers like governments to use the software, and so on."
Large, rapidly-moving tech companies often lack clear, organization-wide answers about how their own products behave. Simple operational questions can be answerable only by a few people or by nobody, requiring investigative effort. Software products grow prohibitively complicated because certain valuable features affect every other feature. Features that expand usability—self-hosting, free trials, organizational policy controls, localization, compliance with local laws, and support for regulated customers—introduce cross-cutting requirements. Each such feature demands integrations, policies, translations, or constraints across the entire codebase. These cross-cutting concerns make product behavior opaque and difficult to document or reason about internally.
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