How to Spend Your First Week on a New Project Without Breaking Anything

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A software architect advises that new technical leads should spend their entire first week observing and documenting a project rather than making any fixes. The recommended approach, called 'Track 0,' involves one-on-one interviews with every team member — developers, DevOps, support, and product — to surface problems people already know but have never formally recorded. Simultaneously, a service inventory map should be built by inspecting what is actually running on servers, which often differs significantly from official architecture diagrams. Critical risks are then separated into real 'landmines' versus unfounded 'legends' through targeted investigation. The week concludes with a plain-language, one-page document listing the top five highest-impact risks, reviewed by the team before being shared with management.

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