Solving Big Problems
My last two posts in this publication have been a bit elaborate, although I suspect people have found them useful since I’ve crossed the 100 followers mark on Medium 🙌 . Thank you to everyone who followed me and/or subscribed to the Product Leadership Journal — I’ll try my best not to disappoint. For this post, I decided to choose a topic that is lighter, but not necessarily smaller: How to solve big problems?
As Product Leaders, we often face a seemingly huge or insurmountable challenge. It could be an impossible deadline, a demanding customer or stakeholder, a cutthroat competitor or a problem with no apparent solution. At some point, we’ve all pulled the all-nighters or just stayed awake staring at the ceiling, searching for a way out (and if you haven’t yet, you will be soon 😅 ). So how do you find a way out? Over the years, I’ve found myself in this situation often (maybe too often). Below are 12 tools that have served me well.
1. Change the environment
Step away. Go for a walk. Absorb the problem in your brain and let your subconscious compute a solution while engaging your conscious mind with something else[1]. Sleep over it. All of these tactics work wonders.
2. Manage your energy, not your time
Time management is in fact mostly energy management[2] (more on this in future posts). To focus on one big problem, ensure that you declutter your mental and physical space of other distractions. Do, defer, delegate or delete[3]. Set expectations with your team if you have to — let your colleagues know you need some focus time. Silence notifications.
I want to add here that not all hours of the day are created equal. An uninterrupted hour early in the morning or late in the evening easily equals 2–3 hours of peak office time peppered with meetings, Slack notifications and phone calls.
3. Change the perspective
When we hit a roadblock, our first instinct is to push through it. We’ve arrived at this point carrying a lot of momentum, so it seems natural to try and push through. Sometimes that just isn’t a possibility, and finding a way around a brick wall is easier than breaking through it. Thinking out of the box, “strong opinions, weakly held”[4] and revisiting previously disregarded options can be helpful here.
Let me share a story here. Many years ago, the embedded software company I worked for in Bengaluru landed a prestigious contract from GE Aviation. As the Tech Lead assigned to the project, I was asked to travel to the US for a week, work with the SME on site, gather requirements and return to base to lead the allocated engineering team. It was expected to take several months; we assembled a team and did a project kick-off, someone from the customer side visited our facility, all the fun stuff. The gist of it was that a new Microsoft Excel rollout threatened to make huge repositories of avionics test suites obsolete, because of the change in file formats (yeah, I know). Our job was to analyze the impact of the changes, write the tools to migrate the test suites and re-validate them. It was my first visit to the US (27 hours by flight). The site visit went according to plan and it was a fantastic, albeit massively jetlagged experience.
I returned bearing bad news: we had significantly underestimated the person-hours required, the impact of the changes was massive. Long story short, I figured out that compatibility for the older file format could be enabled by enabling a flag in the existing code. That’s it, that was the project. After flying people around the world and almost actioning our corporate risk mitigation plans, we charged our client for a single line of code.
4. Reframe the problem
This is Design Thinking 101. Do we have a vendor problem or a poorly planned dependency that could be substituted? Does the high-profile customer want feature X, or do they want problem Y to be solved somehow? Do we need the whole deck by tomorrow, or can we only focus on the key elements? Focus on the outcome, not the solution.
The book “Designing Your Life”[5] is an excellent resource on this. One of the concepts the authors discuss is “gravity problems”: problems that are not actionable should be accepted as facts of life, much like gravity.
5. You’re not alone… you're never alone
We frequently fall into this trap — taking everything on our own shoulders. When I was a developer, I read about how explaining a problem to someone else will often make you come up with the solution yourself. They used to tell us to explain problems to teddy bears if people weren’t around. Fortunately, I never had to engage the services of a teddy bear to debug a tricky algorithm but the concept works.
A while ago I had to collect intelligence on around 170 companies, which would have taken me hours — hours that I would have rather spent on other things on my plate. No one else was available to help (even the teddy bear responded with stony silence…). I estimated it would take me at least 4 hours. Eventually, I spent less than an hour setting up a task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and had the spreadsheet in a few hours for the price of a latte. You’re never alone.
6. Break it down
Break down the problem into a list of actionable steps, and call it “To Do”. One by one, move the items from “To Do” to “In Progress” and then “Done”. It really is as simple as that. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
7. Do the most impactful 20% first
If you’re short on time or resources, figure out the 20% items that will make 80% of the impact and address those first (Pareto Principle). You will find that the nature of a complex problem often changes after you’ve figured out the first 20%. That’s why have lean-agile, iterations and continuous validation. It’s also why every roadmap gets less precise on details the further you are out from today.
If you’re really lucky, you will find that you don’t even have to solve the rest 80% yourself, or that there’s simply not enough value in solving it anymore.
8. Eat frog first
I swear by the tips in this article by Neil Patel on “getting 90% of your work done in the morning”[6], esp. the one about eating frog first. When you have something unpleasant to deal with (like eating a whole frog), make sure it’s the first thing you do. That way you won’t expend a lot of energy worrying about it, and after you’ve dealt with it your day can only get better.
9. Impose a hard limit on hard problems
If it looks like a huge time and energy suck, don’t let it turn into a black hole. Impose constraints on the solution: timebox it, choose a limit to the number of words/slides or any such limit that makes sense. Do your best and then walk away knowing you couldn’t have done better in the circumstances.
10. When all else fails, use the Serenity Prayer
That is all.
11. Share it
If it was a really tough challenge and you came up with creative solutions to it, please take the time to share with others in your team, your company and your community. Document it, Loom it, write up a quick playbook or if you’re into journaling, write it up for future reference. There is nothing worse than having to solve the same problem twice. (BTW, that is what I’m attempting to do here).
12. [Bonus] Sometimes, problems just go away (or become irrelevant)
This is a kind of cheat code, but I’ve been in situations a few times where something that looks like the end of the world just… goes away. People change their minds, world events happen, something relatively more important comes up, constraints get elevated, a colleague who’s done this before offers to help. Never lose sight of the forest for the trees.
I hope you found these ideas helpful and would love to hear more in the comments… and share your own tricks, too! Please Follow The Product Leadership Journal if you found this useful. I’m also happy to connect on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Dive Deeper (aka References)
- How to prime your mind for creative problem solving, summarized by David Charles here, taken from this book which I highly recommend: “59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot” by Prof. Richard Wiseman
- “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time”, Harvard Business Review
- “The Eisenhower Matrix”, Todoist Blog
- “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held: A Framework for Thinking” by Ameet Ranadive
- “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
- “16 Tips for Getting 90 Percent of Your Work Done in the Morning” by Neil Patel in Inc. Magazine
