Better specified than sorry
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Today I learnt an interesting fact about interaction with developers: if you as a product manager want a feature implemented, do not talk to the developer first, write a specification and a mockup first. If you skip writing the specification first (which can and will be changed afterwards) things can turn against you.
In our new web content management product we will have quite powerful support for tagging (that can be used in a folksonomy-like way, as categories, as a taxonomy and even as a thesaurus, as I said, quite powerful). I did specify the conceptual model, the content model, created some mockups (for another product that will use the tagging feature) and discussed with the developer how to implement the tagging user interface.
Together we refined the original idea I had for the user interface, given my general experience what works in AJAX web UI, and his more recent experience with the particular widget framework we are using, examined a set of model application that already implemented some of the metaphors used and came up with a simple, but powerful (and extensible) solution. I knew what the developer would do, the developer knew what he should do, everything was fine and I rushed to the next item in my busy schedule.
Then the unpredictable happened: Schedules were rearranged, priorities shifted, the developer switched to another task, went to vacation, schedules were rearranged again, priorities shifted again, another developer picked up - and knew nothing about our previous discussion and our common mental specification, so he started coming up with his own solution, because he could not use the specification I skipped writing, ran into problems and I had to troubleshoot.
Needless to say, the troubleshooting took more time than writing a helpful specification would have taken, and a written specification would have helped our initial concept discussion as I had to explain less and we could work in a more well-structured way.
Lesson learnt: better specify than sorry!
I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at 