Unmanaged Ambiguity Kills Your Product (And Teams)

What makes a good ticket?

What's the impact of a good ticket?
Working software.

Product people.
Design people.
Tech people.
One team.
(Distributed systems hat on.)

The Myth Of The Perfect Ticket

As a (persona), I (want to), (so that).

User stories are structured language.
Narratives with a goal.
(Complexity makes deflating sounds.)

Who is (persona) really?
What does (persona) perceive?
Where can (persona) go from there?
Which (personas) exist in parallel?
Where do access needs differ?

User stories are useful.
User stories are incomplete.
Ambiguity hides in the blanks.
(Filled by the team's brains.)

TL;DR: Fragmentation in a nutshell.

Ambiguity As The Missing Variable

The button should be blue.

Which shade of blue?
What about the text?
How big should the button be?
(Why are we talking about a button?)

Ambiguity:
Missing context to resolve
fragmented reality,
into a coherent model.

Resolving ambiguity is expensive.
And often done by the same old brains.
Reproducing the same old patterns.
(Senior engineer's brain goes brrrrr.)

Teams are a distributed system.
Brain matter is kinda local.
And alignment expensive.

Diverging button colors are annoying.
Diverging architecture models expensive.
Tech debt a lawful outcome.

TL;DR: Which shade of blue is your favorite? 🩵

The Annoying Truth

Humans are pretty diverse.
And meaning is derived locally.
(Bye, bye perfect specs.)

That's annoying.
..

Ambiguity is inherent to human languages.
And Lojban.. exists.
(I kinda wanna learn it now.)

Let's orient:

• Language is ambiguous.
• Meaning is derived locally.
• Delivery pressure is real.

This is not a "communication problem".
This is a distributed load problem.
And only structure can redistribute load.

As annoying as it might be:
Ambiguity is here to stay.
How can we.. constraint it?

Constraints Reduce Entropy

Observable:
Button is clickable on /buy.

Budgets:
Color=#1e90ff
Text="Buy"
Size>2em <5em

Cascades:
UI test fails.
PR cannot be merged.

Observable:
What can be seen, measured, or checked without interpretation?
Signals > Narratives

Budgets:
What is within bounds, what outside?
Limits > Vibes

Cascades:
What is the impact of a budget violation?
Automation > Heroics

OBC.
..

What happens when you constraint ambiguity?
Misunderstandings resolve earlier.
Conflicts surface sooner.
And delivery becomes quieter.

OBC 📉 Ambiguity
Ambiguity 📈 Entropy
Entropy 📈 Bugz

It's lawful.

TL;DR:
OBCs move ambiguity resolution upstream.
(Best case: before implementation. 😉)

The Future Of Constraint-Based Development

By making constraints explicit.
And enforcement automated.
Alignment becomes observable.
(Culture-as-structure in the making.)

If this resonates,
I invite you to think along:

• Where are OBCs documented?
• What breaks when verification is manual?
• Which OBCs are must-/should-/nice-to-haves?
• Who gets notified when a constraint is violated?
• How does power shift when teams own their OBCs?

Intrigued?
This work can be done deliberately.

Systemic Engineering is how I help teams and leaders
restore coherence in complex systems.

How you can reach me:
📧 alex@systemic.engineer
💼 on LinkedIn

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