The First Slice of the Store

Work from the brief alone. Write what you would produce — actors, requirements, data, a first slice, your unknowns — before opening anything below it; the exercise stops working if you read the reality first.

The brief you were given

You have the online store framed: actors, workflow, data, unknowns. Now pick the first thing to build. The tech lead suggests "the database schema for everything, then the API." Choose, and defend the choice by what it proves.

Your attempt

Nothing here is checked. It exists so that the reveal below is a comparison rather than a reading.

The trap — the move that looks like progress and is not

Building the product catalogue completely — images, categories, admin editing — because it is the part with no unknowns. It ships a demo-able screen in week one and postpones payment, the riskiest piece, to the last days, when there is least time to discover that the provider needs a public webhook endpoint the design never made room for.

Read this even if you are confident. It is here rather than behind a button because it is the move most people actually make, it produces things that look like a project, and its cost arrives when the first hard requirement has nowhere to go.