Be Curious

To make the right decisions, technical leaders and architects need to understand not only the technical part of the project, but its existing limitations, business, integrations, legal and contractual restrictions. I call that the project context.

And I usually recommend to extend this context understanding for all my mentees and more junior colleagues. As a response, they often ask: "Where can I read about this?" First times I was really confused by this question. The problem is that there's no single document that describes absolutely everything about a project. Information is often fragmented, distributed across documents and teams, a lot of things are not described at all.

So what to do and how to extend the overall project knowledge? I spent some time to reflect on that, the answer is simple—be curious. Ask questions, request specific documents, talk to people, and be interested in what’s happening around you. You can start with your manager, neighbor teams, colleagues from other departments.

Over time, it will help you to build a wide picture of the project, improve business understanding, perform better trade-offs analysis and choose more efficient technical solutions.

#softskills #architecture