Why did you say yes?
When I joined Sportradar, there wasn't much work for me yet.
I was still discovering the company, the team and the product.
One day, my team lead came to me.
"We don't really have anything for you right now, but Stefan has an idea. Do you want to try it?"
"Sure."
"No problem."
Looking back...
That was probably the most confident sentence I said during my first weeks.
It was also the least honest.
Inside my head, things sounded very different.
What did I just agree to?
A few minutes later, Stefan walked me through the existing support interface.
"Walked me through" might be a generous description.
If you've ever worked with someone who already sees the product six months ahead, you'll understand.
Ideas came fast.
One feature led to another.
Another idea triggered three more.
You ask one innocent question...
...and suddenly you've opened Pandora's box.
I mostly remember smiling, nodding and saying:
"Yeah."
"Sure."
"Sounds good."
Internally...
Absolute chaos.
Not because Stefan was unclear.
Because I simply didn't have the experience to understand everything he was describing.
Today, I think that's an important distinction.
The existing application wasn't exactly inspiring.
It was an internal tool built over the years.
Pure HTML.
Very little JavaScript.
No CSS.
Blue links.
Purple links after you clicked them.
Functionally, it did its job.
Visually...
...it looked like another era of the web.
My first thought wasn't about the product.
It was about the technology.
"This would look so much better with a modern frontend."
Looking back, it's funny.
Stefan spent most of the meeting talking about users, workflows and new capabilities.
I spent most of it thinking about Spring.
Neither of us was wrong.
We were simply paying attention to different things.
At the time, I wanted to learn Spring.
Really badly.
Everyone seemed to be using annotation-based frameworks.
It looked like the future.
I wanted to understand it.
So I did what every developer does.
I opened tutorials.
Read documentation.
Copied examples.
Spent hours on Stack Overflow.
Copied more examples.
Eventually...
Nothing worked anymore.
Every solution seemed to create two new problems.
My project became a collection of things I no longer understood.
Looking back today, it almost makes me laugh.
Now I know that serving a frontend can be as simple as adding a dependency and putting static files in the right folder.
Back then...
It felt impossible.
Eventually, I gave up.
Not on the project.
On Spring.
I switched to Dropwizard and Vue.js.
The first time I saw an HTML page appear in my browser, I remember thinking:
"Yes!"
Not because I'd solved the product.
Because I'd finally managed to display a page.
That was enough to keep going.
The project grew.
Feature after feature.
Most of them weren't my ideas.
They were Stefan's.
He knew what people needed long before I understood why.
At the time, I thought I was implementing features.
Looking back...
I think I was learning something much more valuable.
I was learning what it looks like when someone has a clear product vision.
Years passed.
Technologies changed.
I never built another Dropwizard application.
I eventually learned Spring.
Later Quarkus.
React replaced Vue in many of my projects.
The technology I had cared so much about quietly disappeared from my day-to-day work.
The application didn't.
Every now and then, I still join a meeting where someone opens that support interface.
Sometimes they explain to someone else how to find information with it.
Most of them have no idea I built it.
I love that.
Not because I want credit.
Because it reminds me that products have a life of their own.
The technology aged.
The product survived.
Looking back, I don't remember much about Dropwizard.
I don't remember much about Vue either.
I remember saying yes.
I remember trying to look confident while understanding very little.
I remember wanting to learn a framework.
And I remember slowly discovering that engineering wasn't only about building software.
It was also about helping someone else's vision become useful to other people.
At the time, I couldn't see that.
My attention was somewhere else.
What I might be wrong about
Today, I believe that saying yes mattered less than why I eventually understood what I had said yes to.
Maybe another version of me will read this chapter one day and realize the real lesson wasn't about product vision at all.
Maybe it was simply about trusting opportunities before feeling ready.
If that's the case...
I'm looking forward to meeting him.
