01
Product
“Can users upload an avatar?”
One line in the sprint backlog.
FIELD REPORT 001
Just an avatar upload
Two reasonable engineers receive a one-sentence product requirement.
REQUEST
Users need to upload a profile picture.
02
Alex
“We’ll need a media service, asset pipeline, async transforms, object storage abstraction and CDN invalidation.”
The architecture diagram now has arrows in four colors.
03
Jo
<input type="file">
Merged before lunch.
04
Two weeks later
Alex has not deployed. Jo has 47 GB of original images encoded in Postgres.
Both have a migration plan.
OBSERVED BEHAVIOR