A lot of commenters here focusing on the non-technical manager bit and ignoring a lot of very good advice that's in here even for technical people. > Ask: Who

A lot of commenters here focusing on the non-technical manager bit and ignoring a lot of very good advice that's in here even for technical people. > Ask: Who specifically will represent the users of this system? You should expect your team to tell you who they are actually creating something for. Who will directly benefit from the work. And a real life individual person they will consult with on questions and who can verify it meets their expectations, at least. If your team is working in a vacuum, it’s a sure sign they’re working on the wrong thing. I've worked on teams where the person in charge of what features would be built had a "vision" and refused to ever actually iterate with users. Result: A thing gets built that nobody wants. > Ask: What are you not doing instead? Real life is all triage and trade-offs. You need to understand what’s not happening so you can communicate that to interested parties. And so you can make sure the right trade-offs are being made in this case. One of my biggest pet peeves in people making decisions is when they refuse to do the actual explicit analysis of costs, especially opportunity costs. Sure, you're laying groundwork for a good thing to happen in the future, but you're also costing that team the work of doing that and the rest of the group a bunch of work figuring out your new code layout. I can get behind it if I get a sense that people did the cost analysis but when the decision seems made willy nilly in a "this seems like it has a benefit" kind of fashion, it's really annoying that I'm spending time having to work with that.