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I work for someone that will pick apart your every idea and make sure you are solving the right problem. The number of times I've been convinced we had to do something for him to figure out the problem is actually in another part of the business is embarrassing. It's a skill I hope to develop myself. It's much easier to just sign off on something and say that's a great idea go for it. To make sure you understand the problem down to the smallest detail and clearly assess if it's the best solution requires a dedication and focus that many managers lack.

In the [Japanese] company that I worked for, they had some serious process around evaluating proposals.

Basically, you had to have the project designed, before pitching it. After that, it had to go through a lot of folks, flinging poo at it (They called these meetings "Design Review" meetings, or "DRs").

It certainly resulted in relatively successful outcomes (and I saw failures, where managers let stuff pass without that level of detail), but I think it also killed a lot of good stuff. Some ideas are worth approaching, even if the approach has not been fully mapped-out.

I'm a huge fan of "Evolutionary Design"[0-1]. It has served me well, but is not for the faint of heart (or the inexperienced). If you don't have a lot of experience (as opposed to intelligence and/or education), then I do not recommend this approach.

I am also a fan of "biting off more than you can chew"[2]. Again, I would only recommend this for experienced people, if it is for shipping projects.

If not for shipping projects, then go for it. Knock yourself out.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/forensic-design-docu...

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-...

[2] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

I agree. A complete up-front design is basically a way to guarantee that you will get several key parameters wrong.

That said, even a very rough outline of an idea should be subjected to an appropriate amount of high-level criticism.

> I work for someone that will pick apart your every idea and make sure you are solving the right problem.

Caveat: One may have to reframe the problem to really solve it http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/ | https://archive.is/uLlkx

>pick apart your every idea and make sure you are solving the right problem

Can you give some examples? Have you identified any specific methodology/process at play here which can be learned?

I have this problem where I work in IT.

I get handed a task which has been decided by layers of several people, I complete the task and then the client comes back to me, wondering why what they want doesn't work, the problem, the task I was asked to complete doesn't solve the original client problem or only partly solves it because many people that did not understand the issue or do not have the technical understanding defined what needed to do and the issue is I had no visibility of the original issue, which I could of easily advised or sorted had I been involved in that.

What happens is they decide what needs to be done and then send me the task, I have no idea of the original problem or what this task does in relation to the chain of everything else.

Instead it's me looks bad and me the client is upset with, while the others that decided this have long gone and moved onto something else.

This is why I no longer do things when people tell me to "do X". I want to know the context: which problem do we think we are solving with X? Why do we think that is the right problem to solve? What other problems could we solve instead?

It makes me a pain in the ass, of course, but a highly effective pain in the ass, I hope, and it seems also one that customers appreciate.

Edit: Oh, and whenever someone says "the customer needs X and Y" the important follow-up is "what makes you believe that?"

Sometimes there's a good reason. Often it's "they said during a meeting that so-and-so, which makes me think that maybe so-and-so, which, if so-and-so, implies that so-and-so."

> Oh, and whenever someone says "the customer needs X and Y" the important follow-up is "what makes you believe that?"

Yeah, that. If possible, the right thing to do is go to that customer and ask "hey, a quick question, what are you trying to achieve when you use that X or Y feature your asked for?"

In my experience, the odds of they answering your question are about as large as the odds of they saying "what are you taking about? I have no need for X or Y and never asked for them." While if you keep talking to the PM, that second answer will never come through.

I'm quite fortunate that leadership at my job (IT) has a very strong "don't let the customer tell you how to solve the problem" mentality. Even stating directly that at times.

Why?

Because this is exactly what happens. IT-adjacent business customer comes and says they need X. Often via a couple conversations we can figure out that Y will do a much better job solving their problem, we develop it, and everyone goes away happy.

Of course, sometimes this results in curious escalations where the customer is frustrated that they aren't getting X, but this is becoming more rare, because aforementioned leadership knows that what the customer wants isn't always what they need (nor best for the company).

Without trying to make it sound too profound - Since I had the realisation of the mistakes I made in the process I wrote about, I have actually been going over other times I had found myself frustrated and most of them could have been prevented by doing as you suggest. Simply asking "why am I doing this?" and I think more importantly "what is the evidence supporting that this needs to be done?".

I had a good reason to write those scripts because I thought I had a problem, if I had tried to find evidence that I actually had that problem and I needed those scripts (by just doing a test run) I quickly would have realised it was all unnecessary.

The best is that when it comes full circle and the customer doesn’t even recognize what is being proposed as an answer to the same problem, accepts it with the understanding that it’s going to advance the product in a different direction, but is still quietly waiting for you to solve the first problem they asked about.

No the best is when you sweat for weeks or months delivering something you have to shoehorn into the product design, only to discover that what they really wanted was something that would take three days, but they thought would be harder to do so they didn't ask.

This is where the internet sucks. I'm sure I could treat us both to beverages of choice and enjoy the story behind your comment.

You’ve described about half of the tyre swing comic :)

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/mFWSFNP

> The customer needs some problem solved. They assume the easiest way there is to get a different problem solved.

This is why I made it a habit to (almost) always ask my customer for a use case.

Yes. "Could you walk me through the entire process where this would fit in as one of the steps, from when you learn about the need to when it is satisfied?" is one of those questions that often open up the big picture more.

I think I'm hitting this issue right now, do you happen to have any links to studies or processes or methodologies that address this?

The scientific method. Don't look at the world through the lens of your knowledge. In fact, forget about the word knowledge. Replace it with "hypothesis".

The world is a lab. Shape it in ways which you think will prove your hypotheses false.

I was more thinking about how to get the people around me, who don't think like that automatically, to work with me on that process.

I can see and understand the pointlessness happening, which is a bit alienating when other people think they are doing hard important work and I think/know they aren't, and I need their buy in to avoid them asking me to also do things I know are pointless.

If I wanted to do pointless things (and I'm not sure I'm even capable of that) I could probably get paid a lot more by changing job, but I'd rather change my job to be less pointless, as it seems better for my mental health.

Aha. To some extent I think it's a hiring and/or organisational values thing. You need the right people to congratulate each other on the right types of work for it to be a long-term sustained thing.

There are also some more formalised versions of the scientific process applied to the workplace. Mike Rother's Improvement Kata come to mind.

Edit: also get good at negotiation! People are complicated and refuse help even when they obviously need it. Being a good negotiator ideally helps everyone.

Second edit: another thing is leading by example. That's been very powerful in my experience.

When you discover they’re solving the wrong problem after they’ve invested in their non-solution, people can get pretty defensive, too.

+1

Working with someone else’s assumptions without first reviewing them inevitably leads to new problems. Because someone had a _faster_ way…