Not actually sinking any time into designing and developing a UI before you've walked through it all on a whiteboard, from the perspective of what sort of models and infrastructure are needed to support the featuresets.
Here's an example: Recurring events.
Sounds simple, right? Well, that's what I thought too, until I spent two months learning about what the "rrule" and "rruleset" RFC specs are, and how nightmarishly complex it is to implement a mixture of single and recurring events with granular CRUD and associated records.
You need to allow updating or deleting all recurring events from a master record, or just a single instance of the recurring event, and to be able to attach DB records to specific virtually-generated dates of the recurrence pattern (this one was hell, since databases don't allow foreign-keys on views). Even had to submit a PR for a Postgres library for parsing rrule's to add the proper support that we needed.
In retrospect what should have happened was try to alter the business requirements so that the functionality was slightly different, but you'd never have known that if you go front-to-back.
Here's an example: Recurring events.
Sounds simple, right? Well, that's what I thought too, until I spent two months learning about what the "rrule" and "rruleset" RFC specs are, and how nightmarishly complex it is to implement a mixture of single and recurring events with granular CRUD and associated records.
You need to allow updating or deleting all recurring events from a master record, or just a single instance of the recurring event, and to be able to attach DB records to specific virtually-generated dates of the recurrence pattern (this one was hell, since databases don't allow foreign-keys on views). Even had to submit a PR for a Postgres library for parsing rrule's to add the proper support that we needed.
In retrospect what should have happened was try to alter the business requirements so that the functionality was slightly different, but you'd never have known that if you go front-to-back.