By the time an engineer is tasked with implementation, a sufficiently-constrained problem or set of problems should be established. Execution risk tends to increase significantly when engineers are tasked with building solutions to an unwieldy set of problems.
But at the earliest stages, when exploring a market and business opportunity, premature constraints can be deadly because they often encourage you to ignore feedback from the market and make assumptions that aren't necessarily correct. The result, in many cases, is that companies end up solving problems that don't exist, or that aren't painful enough to support a real business.
In my experience, there are just as many engineers trying to make their jobs easier (by pushing to constrain scope at all costs) as there are product managers/business owners who aren't very good at defining problems and crafting sensible solutions to them.
Your manager-centric versus engineer-centric comment suggests that managers are inherently less capable of developing solutions to problems than engineers but in reality, the real issue is that there are relatively few product-savvy engineers and relatively few engineering-savvy product managers.
But at the earliest stages, when exploring a market and business opportunity, premature constraints can be deadly because they often encourage you to ignore feedback from the market and make assumptions that aren't necessarily correct. The result, in many cases, is that companies end up solving problems that don't exist, or that aren't painful enough to support a real business.
In my experience, there are just as many engineers trying to make their jobs easier (by pushing to constrain scope at all costs) as there are product managers/business owners who aren't very good at defining problems and crafting sensible solutions to them.
Your manager-centric versus engineer-centric comment suggests that managers are inherently less capable of developing solutions to problems than engineers but in reality, the real issue is that there are relatively few product-savvy engineers and relatively few engineering-savvy product managers.