Comment by muzani

I like to point back at an ancient pattern in engineering: prototypes.

Prototypes are built to learn. They're not optimized nor efficient. They don't scale. They discover what needs to be built and are then thrown away. They should not be sold into production. Learning also includes getting user feedback, or finding out whether all the systems play together well.

Once the prototype is valid, pass it to an engineer to build it in properly and efficiently.

Another variation might be turning the engineers into ops. I did that early on at a startup. We built the whole delivery management system in 3 days - who ordered what, the state of it being delivered (packed/in delivery), informing buyers of product tracking number, asking them whether it was received in good condition, flagging things that have exceeded delivery time, etc. This was before AI and I built it so damn fast because it's a pain to handle this process on spreadsheet. The downside was that orders in those 3 days were delayed by 3 days.

But the big downside to engineers doing these is that you have to pay them engineer salaries. If it leads to a world where marketers can be given engineer salaries and engineers can be given marketing jobs, maybe we're in a better place?