Principled Negotiation — BATNA, ZOPA, Anchoring, Reservation Price

Internalize the four principles of Getting to Yes until they shape your default approach to conflict. For any meaningful negotiation, articulate — without rehearsal — your BATNA, the likely ZOPA, the anchor you'll set or counter, and your reservation price, before the conversation starts. The vocabulary becomes muscle, not jargon. BATNA is the circuit breaker; ZOPA is the search space; anchoring is initialization; reservation price is the exit condition. The whole module is constraint satisfaction with humans in the loop — variables (salary, equity, vacation, title, start date), constraints (market rate, your minimum, their budget, their policy), objective (maximize your weighted utility while remaining feasible for the other party). You solve problems shaped exactly like this in production. Interests-vs-positions is the user-request problem: the stakeholder asks for feature X, you build X, they're unhappy because what they needed was the outcome X was supposed to produce. The senior-engineer reflex — surface the underlying problem before committing to a solution — is Fisher and Ury's second principle. You've been running it in product conversations for years. This module asks you to run it in commercial ones, where it's harder because the stakes feel personal. And "objective criteria" is the published-spec instinct: when two engineers disagree about a pattern, the defusing move is "what do the framework guides say?" — appeal to a shared external authority. Same move, applied to market rates.