Over-Engineering Is a Requirements Problem, Not Perfection
20 Jul 2026
A recent blog post pushes back on a common engineering-culture cliché: the idea that teams need to avoid "building the perfect solution." According to the essay's author, that framing gets the diagnosis backwards—and could be sending engineering teams to fix the wrong disease.
The Core Argument
The author notes that industry professionals frequently say versions of "We don't want to do perfect" or "We don't want to build the perfect solution," treating perfectionism as the enemy of shipping. The essay disagrees with the premise entirely.
Instead, the author defines over-engineering as "solving the wrong problem"—not building too much polish, elegance, or thoroughness into a solution. The telltale sign of over-engineering, per the essay, isn't excessive craftsmanship. It's that the resulting solution is "usually the correct answer to the problems that were proposed"—problems the team "never had" in the first place.
The author goes further, stating a belief that "a perfect solution exists," but only if you start with "a very clear set of requirements." The implication: perfection isn't the risk. Bad inputs are.
This leads to the essay's central claim: "Over-engineering is a failure of requirements gathering"—the consequence of collecting the wrong requirements and then engineering diligently against them.
What's Missing
The report notes several gaps in the source material. There are no examples or case studies illustrating what "wrong requirements" actually look like in practice, and no guidance on how teams should go about obtaining the "very clear set of requirements" the author says perfection depends on. The essay also doesn't specify who wrote it, their background, or when it was published, and it doesn't address whether this framing changes for early-stage products versus mature ones.
Why Founders Should Care
For early-stage founders, this reframing is likely worth a gut-check rather than a wholesale strategy shift. If the essay's logic holds, teams that blame "over-engineering" for wasted sprints may actually be misdiagnosing a requirements failure—and could benefit more from tightening upfront discovery than from telling engineers to "ship messier."
That said, the essay itself flags the risk of overcorrecting: chasing a "perfect solution" without first validating that the requirements are right could still waste engineering effort, just at an earlier stage. There's also a real possibility that teams continue mislabeling requirements failures as "over-engineering," which would keep obscuring the actual root cause and delay fixes.
Founders may want to treat this as a prompt to ask, the next time "over-engineering" comes up in a retro: was the team actually over-building, or was it accurately building the wrong thing? The distinction could matter more for velocity than any decision about how much polish to allow.
Bottom Line
The essay offers no data, case studies, or tactical playbook—only a conceptual reframe. But for founders managing engineering teams, it's a useful lens: the fix for wasted engineering cycles may live upstream, in how requirements are gathered, rather than downstream, in how much discipline is applied to building them out.