Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan emphasizes the insights that engineers can bring to discussions about features and the direction of a technology product. Since engineers are intimately familiar with what is easy or difficult, possible or impossible at a nuts and bolts level, they can bring options to that table that wouldn’t have occurred to others. Similarly, creating plans without designers providing feedback results in significant waste as they attempt to retrofit an idea into existing paradigms, instead of working out an approach that takes their concerns into account from the get-go.

It’s tempting to reduce the headcount in meetings to only the people who “need” to be there, and there’s certainly validity to that. Engage’s approach is to avoid overstaffing our teams, creating nimble “special ops” units with all of the skills needed for success without the bloat of a giant bench of juniors who only do what they’re told. With this right-sized team, we can include the whole team in decision making without being wasteful. Any other approach results in programmers and designers making implementation decisions based on second- or third-hand information, which inevitably leads to features which check the boxes but don’t truly meet the need until they’ve been reworked over and over.

Don’t hinder your team’s ability to deliver by keeping them in the dark. When everyone brings their unique perspective to the planning table, magic can happen, leading to results you didn’t know were possible.