An admin table looks like one component. By the time you've shipped five, it's a system — and most of the work happens in places you didn't budget for. Here's the map.
The previous post named the floor problem: every admin product spends two or three months rebuilding the same eight things before anyone can build the actual product. Auth, RBAC, theming, routing, forms, notifications, feature flags — and tables. Eight items on the list. Eight things every team underestimates.
Today I want to take one of them apart. Not because tables are the most interesting item on the floor — they aren't — but because they are the most representative. The mistakes teams make on tables are the same mistakes they make on the other seven floor items, in miniature. If you understand what's actually inside a "table," the rest of the floor becomes legible.
A table looks like one component. By the time you've shipped five of them, it's a system. Most of the engineering happens in places you didn't budget for.
Here are the five problems hiding inside that system, in roughly the order they bite.
