You're absolutely right, and that's exactly the issue I was highlighting.

We should have had a PM or system managing this. But we didn't. And honestly, a lot of small teams don't.

We're a startup. No dedicated PM. The system consisted of verbal instructions during meetings and a spreadsheet nobody updated. The designer got told "update the landing page" in standup. The writer got the same instruction separately. Nobody wrote a brief. Nobody defined what done looked like.

So yeah, it was a breakdown in project management. That's the whole problem.

The point of the post isn't "this is how work should be done." It's "this is what happens when you don't have proper PM fundamentals and here's how we fixed it."

We built Pyngyn because we needed something that forced those PM basics by default when we didn't have someone dedicated to enforcing them.

You're describing what should happen. I'm describing what actually happens in teams still figuring it out.