In our daily work, you realize that most of your time is spent in communication without any progress in the actual work. This is incredibly frustrating, but it's a necessary evil we can't seem to escape from.
- 👧Talking with the UI designer: They only care if you've faithfully recreated their design.
- 👧Talking with the front-end developer: They only focus on whether you've got the field key type wrong.
- 🤷♂️Talking with the product manager: They only want to know when the feature will go live.
It's pure bullshit! When do I get time to actually code if I'm stuck in meetings all day? Are you kidding me?
So, Where Did We Go Wrong?
Is it that our communicated information has never aligned properly? This isn't something that can be solved by any project or product manager's organization alone. We genuinely need a unified communication mechanism. Every day, there's a massive pile of information that needs to be synced, especially API info, which is the most extensive and complex part of our development...
Is There a Solution?
I've envisioned an ideal approach, something like what's illustrated below:
I think this is the correct and scientific way to communicate. It revolves around API development and entails collaborative communication among different participants to address asymmetric API information. From Product Requirements -> API Design -> Share API documentation (including a mockURL) -> API Debug -> API Testing -> Deploy, as long as the requirements remain unchanged and the API design is agreed upon, I won’t have to waste 80% of my time on communication.
How to Implement This Idea
This plan looks perfect on paper! But how can we execute it effectively? I feel the product manager might not follow my lead. So, I tried to find a tool to solve this problem. Jira (for project management), Postman (for API management), and others didn’t quite fit until I found this tool: EchoAPI!
I explored EchoAPI's product features and attempted to utilize it to complete this work mechanism:
This is my vision. I want to use this method to reduce communication barriers in development. Hopefully, this approach is useful for all of us and helps us reclaim our 80% of the time.
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