We treat the gap between Engineering and Product as a communication problem. It isn’t. It’s a capital allocation failure.

We pay engineers hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold high-fidelity, living mental models of our systems. Then we bleed margin trying to force that technical context outward — leaving stakeholders to guess from the ghost of a reality collapsed. The post-mortem always finds a body. Just rarely the one you needed. The slow bleed just makes everything else more fatal. And no amount of process fixes it — but process treats the symptom or the cause. Are you treating the right one?

The Inversion

Engineers already hold most of the context needed to make good prioritization decisions. They’ve felt what holds, what bends, and what shatters. They just can’t see the price.

Instead of moving the larger, more complex stack of engineering context outward, move the smaller, cleaner signal inward.

This was the trade that slipped. Product management was a brilliant scaling solution — it cleaved business complexity from engineering complexity so both could grow. But we institutionalized the boundary and never measured the cost of crossing it. A trade left unchecked long enough becomes debt. Everything that crosses arrives as a ghost of what was. The question was never how to improve the handoff. It was whether the handoff we inherited is the one we still need.

When engineers hold both the technical model and the economic signal, the problem doesn’t get solved. It simply ceases to exist.

What Valuation Surfaces

Dollar values make hidden asymmetries visible. One feature touches half the sales funnel. Another is worth ten times as much but only to a fifth of it. Priority labels can’t express this. Stakeholder conviction can’t either — two people with equal passion for different features give you zero usable signal. Passion doesn’t survive the boundary any better than engineering context does. A number resolves the tie instantly because it doesn’t ask anyone to evaluate someone else’s feelings.

But a number assigned once is just a snapshot. And snapshots only need time to rot.

A prospect qualifies out. That feature’s value drops immediately. A market shifts and the whole backlog should reweight — but it doesn’t. The cost of delay changes but nobody recalculates. And the values go stale. And not a stride broken. And the team keeps building. And maybe six months later you realize you shipped a feature for a prospect that you knew left, prioritized by a stakeholder who moved teams, justified by a pipeline number that was never updated, scoped by assumptions nobody remembered making, built by a team that was never told — while the work that could have actually moved the margin never shipped.

Did you feel it? That’s a capital allocation failure — visible, present, and the extra coats of paint did their job: they held.

The Closed Loop

The rituals exist. Retros, sprint reviews, quarterly planning. We built ceremonies around reflection and none of them close the loop. Features ship, the team moves on, and the ROI is never measured. This is what separates the idea from decoration — not the valuation, the accountability.

Attach a predicted value before the work begins. Measure what it actually moved after it ships. Track the distance between the two. The mechanism is almost disappointingly simple — but simplicity is what’s left when the noise falls away.

A feature estimated at $200K in pipeline influence moves $40K. The next estimate sharpens. A fix almost deprioritized drives $500K in retention. The intuition recalibrates. Each cycle, the distance between what was predicted and what was real compresses. Not because the predictions started right. Because they started measured.

What was unpredictable becomes measured. What was measured becomes precise. What was precise becomes quiet. The impossible files itself under resolved and the backlog stops haunting.

The destination was already charted. All that’s left is arrival.