Anonymous
In my previous role, there was a situation where another team migrated a flow involving our fintech product to a new platform. Their migration initially only included one of two related products. When a requirement arose for both products to have the same pricing, I proposed migrating both products together to ensure consistency and created a high-level spec to guide the process.
While the team began working on this, they later lacked the bandwidth to complete the migration for both products. They suggested a short-term solution: proceed with migrating one product and implement a fallback mechanism to check if pricing matched. If not, the system would default to legacy pricing. While this approach ensured no immediate technical breakage, I expressed concerns that it would introduce operational inefficiencies by requiring the maintenance of two systems with different pricing mechanisms.
Despite my reservations, a senior leader emphasized the value of incremental changes that didn’t disrupt the system, so I reluctantly agreed to move forward. To address my concerns, I added metrics to monitor how often pricing aligned. Once data was collected, we found that only 20% of transactions matched, meaning the legacy system was still heavily relied upon.
I collaborated with the pricing team to explore ways to synchronize the two systems, but due to their fundamental differences, achieving alignment wasn’t feasible. Using this data, I was able to demonstrate that the short-term solution wasn’t solving the problem and introduced significant inefficiencies. Ultimately, I recommended turning off the cart to prioritize a more sustainable, long-term solution.