Bob was assigned a ticket that wasn’t really a ticket. It had no checklist, no acceptance criteria, no promise of completion. Just a title: “Explore the new payment flow. Document what we find.”
A spike.
He didn’t love spikes. They felt like wandering into a forest without a map—no clear finish line, no guarantee you’d return with something useful. But he also knew some questions couldn’t be answered by building. Some required looking first.
So he spent the morning digging through logs, reading old pull requests, and tracing how money actually moved through their system. It reminded him of untangling a box of cords—every cable connected to something, but none in ways that made sense.
By noon, he discovered three different places where the payment logic lived. None of them quite agreed with each other. He sighed, the way someone sighs when they realize the real work isn’t writing new code but understanding the old.
Alice, his product lead, walked by.
“Any progress?”
“Sort of,” Bob said. “I know more than before, but I don’t know if I know enough.”
“That’s how a spike is supposed to feel,” she said. “It’s not about certainty. It’s about clarity.”
After she left, he went back to the code. He noticed something interesting: deep in one of the older files, someone had written a comment.
“Temporary hack. Should revisit someday.”
It was dated four years ago.
Bob laughed quietly. Someday meant never, unless someone like him wandered in with a flashlight and a ticket that asked him to explore instead of deliver.
By late afternoon, he wasn’t closer to a solution, but he understood the terrain. He knew where the risks were, where the confusion lived, and which parts were sturdy enough to build on.
He opened a document and wrote—not code, but notes:
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“We can fix the flow if we touch three parts.”
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“But if we do that, we’ll break two unrelated things.”
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“If we rebuild instead of patch, we save headaches later.”
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“Estimated time: longer, but cleaner.”
He didn’t sugarcoat anything. He didn’t write what people wanted to hear. He wrote what he saw.
Before leaving, he shared the document with the team. A few minutes later, Alice replied:
“Good. Now we can make a real decision.”
Bob turned off his monitor and sat still for a moment.
He realized something simple: A spike wasn’t about answering a question. It was about preventing the team from asking the wrong one.
It was a reminder that engineering wasn’t only about building. Sometimes, it was about pausing long enough to understand whether the thing you think you should build is even the right thing to build.
And that small pause, that quiet investigation, often saved weeks of noise later.