This is a real excavation. Names and companies have been anonymized.
We keep missing deadlines. Product blames engineering, engineering blames unclear requirements.
Your organization has no one — not product leadership, not engineering leadership, not you — who has ever built and enforced a structured commitment process where requirements are validated as complete by both sides before a deadline is set. So every project enters engineering half-understood, engineers discover gaps mid-build, and both sides blame each other for the inevitable slip because neither side can see that the failure happened before the work started. The culture of rewarding fast commitment then calcifies this gap, because anyone who tries to slow down gets punished, making the missing process feel like it cannot be added even if someone figured out what it should look like.
Path A: Build the gate yourself
Design a single-page "ready to build" checklist — covering what a requirement must contain before engineering is expected to estimate or commit — and pilot it on one team for one sprint cycle, positioning it not as a new process but as an experiment to see if it reduces mid-sprint surprises and rework.
Timeframe:
Addresses: the missing definition and missing handoff gate (your team literally does not know what "ready" looks like, so you create the artifact that makes it concrete)
Requires: you and one willing product-engineering pair to co-author the checklist together and agree to use it for a single cycle, with no broader organizational buy-in needed yet
Works if: you have at least one product counterpart who is tired enough of the blame cycle to try something different, and you frame it as a time-boxed experiment with a measurable outcome (fewer mid-sprint requirement changes) rather than a permanent process change that triggers cultural resistance
Learn more about the method: Read the blog