Bring Me Problems, Not Solutions!
I know what you’re thinking, “Isn’t it the other way around?” Fear not! I work at Facebook as a Solutions Engineer where we are supposed to engineer er… solutions. But I am here to share that, from experience, it is always better to focus on the problem you are trying to solve and doing great work rather than the solution. But first, let me tell you a story:
A few years ago I was having a conversation with my manager where I naively asked: “How can I have more impact at work?” I am sure he had heard this question many times before because he immediately responded with: “Don’t focus on impact, focus on solving problems. Impact will follow”. I appreciated his feedback, but honestly, at the time I didn’t get it. I thought I was awesome enough to come up with ‘solutions’ that would become super impactful projects that would translate into incremental ads revenue. When my boss told me that thing about solving problems, I just simply changed the narrative in my head to: ‘I am awesome enough to come up with problems that would become awesome solutions that would translate into blah blah’. You get the idea. Sometimes we think we are going to be illuminated, but from experience that’s hardly the case.
Engineers don’t get paid to be creative; we get paid to drive results.
With that in mind, I took a different approach. Back in 2019, I decided to reach out for help. I asked other Solutions Engineers working outside my team what they were working on. I put my ego aside and said to myself: “I am just going to join an existing project and do the best I can to do great work”.
I joined the team working on a project around digitizing print media. After working on it for a few weeks and launching a first version, I understood the actual business problem that we were solving: Retail businesses were looking to shift budgets to digital because printed weekly offers were getting more expensive to produce, but they didn’t know how to make the transition. There was no platform that would allow them to put their existing weekly offers into a digital format on specific store locations. This was an actual business problem, a Job to Be Done. By the end of 2019, I learned that it doesn’t matter who identifies the business problem; what matters most is how well you understand it.
This year, I am just focusing on problems and doing good work. I am focusing on talking to businesses to learn as much as I can about their challenges and try to go as deep as I can to fully understand the problems we are trying to solve. Solutions Engineering’s super power is customer centricity, and having as many conversations with businesses as we can is how we truly understand their challenges. This year I am focused on improving the buyer experience of Facebook and Instagram Shops because businesses want to have a shop where there are enough ‘shoppers’ to justify their investment. Commerce businesses ultimately want more sales. This year I fully understood that basically I need to focus on the problem we are trying to solve and doing great work rather than the solution.
