Can developers challenge product decision?
Tags: remote, webdev, development, watercooler
Published: 2020-04-24 14:05:28

---
title: Can developers challenge product decision?
published: true
description: Continuous journey of working from home due to COVID-19 outbreak at the world. This is my journey, my challenges in trying to be productive and completely changing my work habits from office first to remote first. (Working from home Journey (Day 26/27))
tags: remote, webdev, development, watercooler
series: working from home
---
_Thanks for reading! I'm writing about my remote work journey thanks to covid-19 forced me to_ 😂 _I'm writing now almost a month now (Day 26 and 27)_ 

## Work-related

The beginning of this week is still mainly around tackling big pull-request and supporting our apps team.

I prepared my open questions about a 3K LoC AB-Test which seemed too big. Big in, it is not easy to answer what is tested.

Our open questions were:

* Do we want to test the value of our Outfits API?
* Do we want to test the value of the Outfits UI as entry point?

From my understanding, the test was about a), yet the solution seems to be about b). Therefore, we scheduled a meeting with the Product Manager.

At the end, she decides what to put in here, yet we raised our concerns in creating such big pull-requests and the team should have smaller work packages (slices).

One thing I will not easily forget is something she said, when she thought we were blocking this and we want less features:

> I'm surprised that developers are now challenging product managers. I thought you do what we need. 

![Alt Text](https://media.giphy.com/media/xT0xeHDVBcAulhRJRK/giphy.gif)

This hit me. I believe in any lean / agile environment giving feedback and asking questions is the whole idea of having such processes. Even when this person is not in your team. 

So, shouldn't developers request changes to Features? **Yes you should**.

Our job is not about doing what business and product want without questioning anything. Even if you have a good relationship personally, this will end up in [Mini-Waterfall](https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/are-you-practicing-agile-or-mini-waterfalls.html).

When a feature is given to us frontend developers, there are multiple levels we need to evaluate:

* Is the given design consistent (challenge UX) ?
* What hypothesis do we want to answer ?
* Are we measuring the correct things to answer it?
* How many different slices (work packages) do I see?
* Is it involving some legacy codebase?
...

## Today I (re)learned (TIL)

Debugging can be a lot of fun!

![Debugging](https://media.giphy.com/media/YFkpsHWCsNUUo/giphy.gif)

What I learned were rather trivial things. Yet:

- Be careful when using custom `X-Custom-Headers`. Some weird bugs I discovered were related to our Frontend overwriting them, when WebViews were injecting them too.

- Scala Template engine (Twirl) is confusing. Nothing to add 😃

## Personal

This week is really intense. I have many topics and deadlines at the same week. Thanks to my wife, who took another leave from work, I can focus.

Yet, it's a lot of things and I will be happy when this whole week ends. Giving Feedback to 7 people, doing bug bashing for 2 weeks, fixing other stuff, questioning product designs etc..

I guess this is what happens the more experienced you get. You see more stuff. Otherwise I start enjoying working from home. It's stressful (the whole covid-19 situation) but I feel better. Not commuting means less time wasted in busses, trains. Less exposure to sickness.



Take care!

Cheers,

Ferit