🤔 Always ask the “Why?” question

The skill of asking Why-questions separates an apprentice from a master.

Why do I need this?
We’ve seen hundreds of situations where code was written and turned out to be unnecessary. Saying that it turned out to be unnecessary is a soft formulation.

The task was completed with quality and on time. You are proud of the code you’ve written. It has incredible solution performance, a truly great user experience, or you have automated everything possible.

The user will not see this solution. Other developers will not reuse your code. You have exerted effort in vain.

Why does the business need this?
When a product manager comes to you with a request for a specific solution, they may think in terms of features. This means you will hear:

— “Let’s add login via Facebook, Google, Github, and VK to the authentication form.”

When you ask “Why do we need all this?”, you will eventually get an answer that boils down to these methods being commonly used by services of your competitors.

Copying can be a working strategy, but paying users bring money to the business. Ask about the value that this enhancement brings. What problem does it solve — or if a problem even exists.

It may turn out that your users are satisfied with email and password — for example, they don’t want to “expose” their social media accounts in your product. On the contrary, they prefer a fresh start.

The question “Why” in any form can be inconvenient for all colleagues who don’t have data to confirm that something is truly necessary.

For the business, this same question is a valuable way to ensure that the team is not wasting time and money.

Find real problems and bring value to others
The story of how one of my engineers found that there’s a disconnect between the current traffic team, sales, and analytics team.

— “Can we add a field for selecting a city during order flow?”
— “Sure thing. Can I ask a little bit more on why you need this?”
— “We need to know where our users are from.”
— “Okay, why that’s important?”
— “Gather statistics on which cities our users are from — we want to have more context where the sales are coming from”
— “Why?”
— “We want to find the most paying regions right now, as we feel there’s fit. And we want to find the least paying ones and try to figure out why that happens”
— “Don’t we have enough data from Google Analytics? I’ve previously worked on this and set up analytics for marketing team”
— “Oh, we have that?”