To Begin, You Must Study the End

A great chess player, José Raúl Capablanca said to begin, you must study the end.

When it comes to decision making, get the whole picture and plan to the end - before you act.

⁠That's the point of the 'requirements phase' of an engineering project, where you gather up requirements in many categories. Compliance, merchantability, functional, user experience, cost, manufacturability, test, quality assurance, etc. All of them are important, and they represent an engineer thinking it through. Normally you want to iron out these requirements before you begin. Ideally you want to get stakeholder buy-in, and agree with everyone on what you're delivering.

disclaimer - the image featured was generated by an ai tool