Collaborate with others to determine design specifications or details
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
Software drafts well and sends at volume, and vertical support agents now resolve a large share of inbound questions end to end. What does not transfer is the relationship, and the judgment about when a message should not be sent at all.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Routine communication and explanation |
| Jobs that do it | 16 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Communicating with Supervisors, Peers, or Subordinates (4.A.4.a.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 16 occupations that perform it.
- Define product requirements, based on market research analysis, in collaboration with user interface design and engineering staff.
- Confer with clients regarding the nature of the information processing or computation needs a computer program is to address.
- Consult with users, management, vendors, and technicians to determine computing needs and system requirements.
- Confer with staff, users, and management to establish requirements for new systems or modifications.
- Communicate with customers, sales staff, or marketing staff to determine customer needs.
- Consult with users, administrators, and engineers to identify business and technical requirements for proposed system modifications or technology purchases.
- Collaborate with system architects, software architects, design analysts, and others to understand business or industry requirements.
- Confer with systems analysts, engineers, programmers and others to design systems and to obtain information on project limitations and capabilities, performance requirements and interfaces.
- Participate in product design reviews to provide input on functional requirements, product designs, schedules, or potential problems.
- Collaborate with web development professionals, such as front-end or back-end developers, to complete the full scope of Web development projects.
- Solicit, obtain, and integrate feedback from design and technical staff into original game design.
- Assist users in formulating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) requirements or understanding the implications of alternatives.
- Communicate with staff or clients to understand specific system requirements.
- Confer with end users to define or implement clinical system requirements such as data release formats, delivery schedules, and testing protocols.
- Confer with vendors to evaluate new equipment or reagents or to discuss the customization of product lines to meet user requirements.
- Consult with lighting director or production staff to determine lighting requirements.
- Consult with management to ensure agreement on system principles.
- Guide design discussions between development teams.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for routine communication and explanation, and what it costs.
Drafting replies costs nothing beyond the assistant you already pay for. Only move to a support agent billed per resolution once the inbound volume is large enough that the per-resolution price beats the hour it takes you.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
16 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Clinical Data Managers
- Computer and Information Research Scientists
- Computer Network Architects
- Computer Systems Analysts
- Computer Systems Engineers/Architects
- Computer User Support Specialists
- Database Architects
- Geographic Information Systems Technologists and Technicians
- Lighting Technicians
- Molecular and Cellular Biologists
- Search Marketing Strategists
- Software Developers
- Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers
- Telecommunications Engineering Specialists
- Video Game Designers
- Web and Digital Interface Designers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Communicate with others about specifications or project details”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.