Ask a stupid question…

Yesterday I asked a lot of stupid questions. And it was the best thing I did all day.

I realised over the last couple of weeks I had made a lot of assumptions about the how our front-end development team had implemented some of my designs for our current project. I had been assuming they were reusing a lot of existing patterns and components, so when they started asking some me unexpected questions about how the components should work, this suggested this may not be the case. I realised I needed to probe a bit further…

So we sat down together and went through every single component that we were using in the design and I asked really basic questions about what patterns they had built and used. What are they called? What colour are they? Are they used anywhere else? How reusable are they? I thought I knew the answers, but the exercise was to reset my assumptions, and know the facts. I felt like they were really stupid questions at the time, but hey, no one started pointing and laughing. In fact, I got really clear explanations about how things worked, and I ended up with a really thorough picture of how the feature had been built.

I’ll be asking a lot more stupid questions in future.