PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND COLLABORATION

WORKING WITH PRODUCT MANAGERS AND CUSTOMERS A harness engineer rarely works alone, and the quality of the conversations matters as much as the quality of the code. Start with product managers, who decide what the product should do. They often describe wishes in plain language, such as "the agent should handle refunds." Your job is to turn that wish into questions that can be answered. Which refunds, up to what amount, and who approves the large ones? What should the agent do when it is unsure? Each answer becomes a rule in the harness, a test in the evaluation set, or a limit in the budget. Customers and users also teach you things that no dashboard shows. Read a sample of real conversations regularly, because patterns of confusion appear there first. When a user complains, resist the urge to explain why the system works as it does. Instead, ask what they were trying to do, and treat the answer as a free test case.