/r/whataretensors is correct that you have to pick your battles. However, if you're asking us then I'm going to assume that the lack of documentation is slowing

/r/whataretensors is correct that you have to pick your battles. However, if you're asking us then I'm going to assume that the lack of documentation is slowing you down enough that it is in your company's interest for docs to get written. Lack of docs puts timely product delivery at risk. What are the product-owner's overall goals? You should tie documentation to that. In a healthy organisation, the product-owner's goals will either be already pretty clear or they'll be actively working on making them clear. If they aren't clear to you then do a quick check through emails/minutes/retrospectives to see if you've missed something and ask for a half hour on their calendar to seek clarity. Take the bulk of that time to listen[1] to what their priorities and stressors are. Pay particular attention to where your work fits into that. If your work actually doesn't fit into that then you've got a bit of an organisational incentives problem. Assuming it does, then make your case that documentation in a canonical place (even if it is those same json files and some comments) is not a nice-to-have but a need-to-have for frontend to deliver what the product owner needs. For all of this, I've assumed that the product owner for the backend and frontend is the same person. If it is two different people, then you might have a conflict of incentives that needs to be fixed: The backend team has little/no incentive to help the frontend team. If that is the case, then you should have a chat with the product owner of the frontend team because that is an organisation-level problem and some incentives will need to get re-aligned. [1] https://hbr.org/2016/07/what-great-listeners-actually-do https://hbr.org/2016/07/what-great-listeners-actually-do