[josephmosby]

We have an alternative path that works for us: get a terrible, ugly, but functional version of the feature up as quickly as possible. Preferably, the uglier the better. Skip the tests for now. Put it behind a feature flag or some other way to "get it into production" without any real users able to see it.

This lets you try the feature out end-to-end. Click buttons that call APIs and see if the right actions occur. Fix all the stuff that breaks when you first try this out.

Then show it to a friendly. Product manager maybe, engineering manager, another developer... whatever. Someone who understands you're just looking for someone to try out this feature with you.

It works now? Great. Put unit and integration tests around it. Make sure that this happy thing you have running won't accidentally break. Now make it pretty. Give it the design product actually asked for. They'll have feedback, which you can now incorporate safely because you have tests.