Across the Aisle — PMs, Designers, Customers, Sales

Make translation a deliberate practice. Render technical reality correctly into product, design, customer, and sales language without losing fidelity. Listen for the underlying need beneath every cross-functional ask. MVC is, among other things, a cross-functional translation device: the model is the engineer's domain, the view is the designer's, the controller is the negotiation layer — and "fat models, thin controllers" is partly a coordination principle: keep the negotiation surface small and push complexity into the lane that owns it. Don't let product rules leak into your schema; don't let engineering constraints masquerade as product impossibilities ("we can't do X" when you mean "X costs this much"). And model names are cross-functional vocabulary: name the class User vs Customer vs Account and you've chosen the noun the whole team argues with. Get the name right with the PM and designer, not just the engineers — names matter more than types.