Recently I caused a colleague to lose some trust in me, and it was due to a minor but frequently repeated mistake on my part.

She’s a product manager and I’m a engineer and we’re working on a project together.

As PM, she has created a Notion document laying out the high-level context of the project. Why are we doing this? Why now? What is the timeline? What are the various expected work packages? That sort of thing.

This document is then the entry-point for me to do my thing as a software engineer. Regardless of where you work, a senior engineer is expected to be able to turn high-level specifications from Product into Technical specifications and an implementation plan.

I wanted to know the timeline for this project. I skimmed the document and couldn’t find a timeline. It just said “Partner_Z has committed to a partnership as soon as this feature is available.”

So I took to Slack and posted this in our team channel:

[question] Partner_X launch timeline

From Notion: “A top partner has committed to going live with us as soon as we are ready”

@Joe — I was wondering if we have any internal targets for go-live with Partner_X?

“ASAP” isn’t really motivating 😊 besides, I imagine we need to align across Commercial, Product, and Product Marketing

Moments later, Joe, the product manager, replies:

@Nick it’s The initial dates we communicated to them are end of February. So Feb is our aim :)

I copy the text, searched for it in the Notion document, and there it was, an exact match. And it was the next sentence after “Partner_Z has committed… as soon as this feature is available.”

Maybe you’re thinking, this sounds like an honest mistake, why make a big deal of this?

Because it’s mistakes like these that lead to people losing trust in you. Heck, even I lost trust in myself in this case!

Heaven knows I’ve made this mistake many times. Maybe 10 times or more in this year alone? “Little things add up,” as people say.

So I’m writing this as a reminder to myself: read more carefully.

But there’s a twist here. I’m one of two engineers working on the project, and it was actually the other engineer who had posed the question originally to me.

He’d sent me a DM quoting “Partner_Z has committed to a partnership as soon as this feature is available.” And I took that at face value thinking that’s all the info that was available in that doc.

Someone asked me a question, quoted something from from the doc, and I assumed it was all the info that existed on the topic in that doc. Then I asked Joe without first checking for answers myself, because I trusted the person to have done the due diligence.

That’s me failing to check twice in one scenario.

Also, it turns out, that person already knew the timeline and was actually asking me a question about a slightly different thing!

So I wasn’t wrong twice but three times in a single scenario. I’m on freakin’ fire here.

Now, let me tell you about one of the people I quietly look up to most in one of the companies I’ve worked at. He is Bobby.

Bobby was always meticulous. I’ve never caught him asking a question where the answer is easily found. As a result, every time he asks something, people knew he had done his due diligence. This trust spilled over and people just knew his words could be trusted when he says anything.

This means projects move faster because of Bobby, because there is never a need to answer obvious questions, or worse, undo a decision that was made on inaccurate assumptions from skimming text.

How does one train to be more like Bobby and less like me?

I honestly believe the answer is simply to practice the art of fact-finding and reading carefully.