Daily Surprises and Unexpected Self-Discoveries in Product Management - #1. Limited focus span

I am starting a digest where I intend to capture surprising discoveries I make about myself in my professional career. Mostly, these are going to be failures, mistakes and flaws in thinking. The key intention here is to record when I miss something I probably should not to understand how I might do better

It’s Wednesday and it means that anything can happen. And it usually does. Today for instance I realized I actually failed to do something rather important: go deep down in the feature request to explain the problem to be solved. Instead I described the request as made by another team and passed it over to the engineering team without going too deep. As we were talking through the feature with engineering, the feature request while now clearer became too much of a solution in itself without a clear explanation of the problem.

One of the partner teams is using a particular data transfer mechanism to retrieve data they use in their app. That data has a time to live that expires every 24 hours from the moment the last update came in. As a result in case the record is still active but is not updated within 24 hours, it is removed from this cache and no longer available for partner app to consume.

While the potential change to extend the time to live to a longer period is rather simple, we are in fact solving a very narrow and specific problem. This feature does raise a number of questions such as why is this transfer mechanism used not just for displaying updates and notifications but to rather populate app on its launch with a lot of data.

There are other APIs and services that allow to retrieve the same data however the app is using this particular mechanism for a far wider set of use cases. Why?

I definitely failed to ask myself some of those questions and document them in the feature request. At the same time, this is not something I believe is typical of me. The surprising discovery is that the number of problems I am looking at will impact the degree of my inquisitiveness and ability and aptitude to go deeper in understanding the problem space. In other words I have a limited focus span that I may exhaust resulting into not well framed and thought through problem statements