How hard can it be? I work at a property management SaaS company. Landlords use the platform to manage their properties, collect rent, track maintenance requests, handle lease contracts. Four developers, one product. Small team means you don't get tickets scoped down to a single component, you get features, end to end. I joined as a backend developer but quickly ended up touching everything: APIs, frontend, infra, and eventually mobile. That's just how it works when there are four of you. One day, a senior developer pinged me. The product needed a notification center. Users were asking for it, when a settlement gets transferred, when a maintenance request comes in, when a lease is about to expire. These are things landlords need to act on. Notifications made sense. The ask was simple. The notification system design turned out not to be. I didn't just start coding. I went to the whiteboard, mapped out the flow, discussed edge cases with the senior developer, made sure I understood what we actually needed.…