Understand why before how
Imagine that your manager or project manager tells you they are considering making the background of a landing page a video instead of an image. They're about to hire a consultant to make that video. They want to know from you how difficult it would be to embed that video. What is your first reaction? Most engineers start thinking about the how right away, and then diligently provide a timeline estimate. This is a mistake. Your first instinct should always be to understand the why first. Is the goal to increase user engagement? What will the added latency of a video load do to engagement? Are you going to need additional technical effort to make sure that slower devices (e.g. mobile phones on 3G) aren't negatively impacted by that latency? Do they just want the page to feel more dynamic? Is there is a Javascript-only solution to this problem, that can be delivered in a few KB instead of a few MB? You can't fully understand how until you understand why In many cases, without