Engineering Feasibility: A Useful Question

When design teams approach engineers for feasibility input, this is the question I reach for:

What is the solution we could put together in a day? A month? A year? What are the tradeoffs between them?

Most engineering decisions come down to tradeoffs, and this puts that question right at the forefront. It forces everyone to think in spectrums rather than binaries — not “can we build this?” but “what can we build, and what do we sacrifice at each timescale?”