Seasoned Engineer: "He's going to come back in a week and ask for croissants, better focus on just making blue cookies now and worry about the future later".
This. Engineers talk about feature creep, but forget to mention configuration creep. You can make anything you want! Yes it’s taken two years and no we didn’t nail the principal usecase. But we can make a version 2!
Ideally engineers should have a sense of the business and so know which are expected feature creep and which are unlikely.
So you design the blue cookies, but you leave extra space because next week you will be installing more paint guns so you can do more colors, but you limit it to 6 colors and when the CEO asks for more say we are out of space, do you really want to invest in more colors, eliminate and existing one, or the new idea.
Crescents may be a good investment, are they likely enough and similar enough to do them on the same line. (if you cookies have nuts the correct answer might be we want a whole new factory even if there is commonality just so we don't need the "nuts also used in the facility that" makes this label)
Don't leave extra space. Ask the question and get a "no, we don't need that", then call out the frequent specification misses when the schedule slips due to all the rework. (Or that doesn't happen and realize they might know what they are doing)
Pain like this is critical feedback for a organization. Blunting it hurts more in the long term.
