Joining a fast-moving project often starts with a question: “How busy are you right now?”

Suddenly, you’re pulled into a sprinting team with looming deadlines, a pile of documentation, and tools or processes you’ve never used before.

Your instinct is to catch up as quickly as possible. You want to show you’re helpful, responsive, and worth having on the team. But what if that rush to blend in means missing your largest opportunity?

When you’re new, you see things differently. You haven’t absorbed all the team’s assumptions. You aren’t used to the way things are done. That moment—brief and unrepeatable—is what I call the “Zero Momentum Advantage.”

Seizing the moment

How do we seize the Zero Momentum Advantage while still supporting the team’s immediate needs?

Instead of rushing to catch up and blend in, take a moment to explore your fresh perspective. You’re uniquely positioned to notice misalignments, missed steps, or unclear assumptions—aspects that others may have stopped questioning long ago.

Here are a couple of examples that show how these behaviors can play out in real project work—and the small but important opportunities they uncover.

Q: The requirements state the device must be recyclable, but I looked at the site visit plans and don’t see any questions about local recycling capabilities [this digging to compare facts against intent]. Do we understand user recycling capabilities already? [a question you might assume is true to save time instead of asking].

A: Actually, we should add that to the site visit plan. Without digging a bit, we would never have known that the site visit overlooked recycling capabilities—without asking, the problem would have gone unresolved.

Another example where again we are checking things out for ourselves and pointing out something that’s unclear to us:

Q: Someone told me the device has a stand-by mode, but when I checked the firmware I didn’t see it [digging]. Can you show me? [‘dumb’ question].

A: There’s not supposed to be a standby mode—let me know who told you that so I can align with them.

The benefit of these two behaviors is that they actually help you more effectively get up to speed. By digging into details yourself, you won’t waste anyone else’s time. In the second example, it’s also entirely possible they sit down next to you and show you how standby mode works—meaning you’ve learned more about the project, and a new way of coding a standby function.

Behaviors to avoid

To execute successfully, avoid two key pitfalls: Digging too deeply (which takes up too much time) or asking “why didn’t you just do it this way…” questions, which are a quick way to frustrate your new team.

Instead, pick and choose where to dig, and frame questions to enable understanding first and foremost while opening the door to improvement secondarily. Both take a bit of instinct and experience to get right, but they are also valuable skills in product development.

I discussed this topic with a lawyer friend, who told me about a case they joined long after it was initiated. They had read in the file that certain documents were submitted to the court years prior, with other files referencing those—and even more files referencing those—like an anchor chain.

After digging a little, they discovered the original documents were never filed with the court: The whole chain was essentially anchored to nothing. The existing team had “known” for years these had already been filed, so had no reason to double check.

Having a new team member allowed them to discover that wasn’t the case. If that error hadn’t been caught, it could have compromised everything built on it.

Now’s the time!

When it comes to joining a fast-moving team or onboarding someone onto your team, unfamiliarity can be an asset if it’s strategically approached. Checking a few key assumptions and asking the right questions help build a better understanding of the project and potentially catch any issues, risks, or false assumptions that long-standing team members are unlikely to notice.

So the next time you hear “hey, how busy are you right now?” remember that unfamiliarity isn’t just a burden—it’s the Zero Momentum Advantage—and no one else on the team can see things quite the same way.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR: Navigating the Paradoxes of Human Compatibility Testing

Nigel Syrotuck is a StarFish Medical project engineer.