🧩 I fell into a trap. One I’m often warning others not to fall into. Two of them, actually.

đź’» The solution I’m building for one client isn’t necessarily a hard problem. There are existing solutions, but we want a simple MVP at lowest cost, so most paid services are off the table. With our custom integration needs, we decided to roll most of it ourselves.

No, this wasn’t the trap.

🏗️ I built a POC, deployed it, and it worked well, but quickly realized that to truly solve their problems, we’re lacking many features. Scope creep appeared rapidly - this POC would need significant expansion before becoming a viable MVP… especially after the PM showed me another ticket for a related issue that might be addressed by my solution.

This also wasn’t the trap.

🔍 While exploring these expanded requirements, I found a promising open source tool. It wasn’t perfect and lacked the specific integration I needed, but supported API integration. I timebox’d myself to try replacing my POC with this tool. Made progress before realizing the APIs don’t map perfectly and I’d need an Adapter layer, but had to demo what I had.

During our discussion about these exciting possibilities, I realized the trap…

I over-engineered. I made the problem more complex than necessary.

And then came the second realization: I got caught up in the tech. Not the problem.

🤔 I’m always telling people that as developers and engineers, we enjoy solving hard problems. For many of us, it’s why we do what we do. The truth is, we sometimes want to make things difficult, even when they aren’t, because we crave that sense of achievement.

This was my mistake. We could easily solve the problem manually first, and once we understand the actual interactions and solutions better, automate away the friction and tedium. But we should start with the solution, not the tech. We should solve the problems that exist, not the ones we think exist.

. . .

#SoftwareDevelopment #OverEngineering #TechLeadership #SolutionDesign #SoftwareEngineering #ProblemSolving #MVP #ProductDevelopment #Engineering #TechMindset #DeveloperLife #CodeLife #EngineeringLeadership #LessonsLearned

This post was originally planned for LinkedIn, but I either never shared it, or can’t find it now. I vaguely remember having a conversation about it, so it’s out there somewhere…