It's common for engineering managers to want to be fully informed about the tasks that need to be completed for a given epic before jumping right in and implementing it. They often rely on discovery tickets as their go-to tool to achieve this.

While these tickets can provide valuable insight, it's important to note that there are limitations to their predictive abilities when it comes to the coding process itself. Ultimately, it's only through actual coding that developers can comprehensively understand all the scenarios that may arise.

Even if your team has worked on a codebase for years and regularly addresses technical debt, it can still be challenging. The situation may even worsen as the project gets older!

When facing a big problem, it's essential to balance predicting the necessary effort and gaining practical experience by creating a Proof of Concept (PoC). This will help you better understand the level of complexity involved, which you can then convey to the rest of your team.

Many developers tend to take shortcuts and rush through the discovery process, which can ultimately result in the entire project taking longer than if they had started implementing it from the beginning.

Agile methodologies provide us with the necessary tools to iterate over products. It is better to have a functioning product that could be better than to have a detailed list of requirements and steps to create perfect software that will never be implemented.

Avoid applying the waterfall methodology to your epics; be lean.