My Problem is Unique
While every person is unique in their own way, our problems are similar in many ways. It is easy to forget and let the thought that our problems are unique prevent us from reaching our real potential. Understanding that many people felt what we are feeling, and realizing that others met similar challenges and problems, can help us create significant change, and help us leverage the knowledge of others.
Many teams take pride in building and implementing things that other teams created full blown products or solutions that would solve their needs, and using those can save them many hours and maintenance energy. Different team members unknowingly find satisfaction in building something on their own, while ignoring the cost of returning later to this feature or framework for bugs and additional changes, at the cost of losing focus. Some product leaders might insist on a specific feature that prevents using significantly faster solutions, just for the sake of feeling proud of their uniqueness, or for avoiding the acceptable pressure of focusing on finding the real business uniqueness.
Symptoms (Some or all):
- Declaring “My problems are unique”.
- Reinventing the wheel, and implementing existing tools and solutions.
- Not using solutions that are “good enough” because of missing features.
- Making mistakes that could be avoided by learning from best practices.
Prescription:
The remedy for this problem is composed of regularly practicing our similarities with others and learning from them, while supplying reassurance and focus to our uniqueness. Product teams should focus on what makes them unique and enjoy the benefits of using and learning from other teams’ solutions and tools.
The practice involve searching for best practices, open source solutions, available tools and learning from your competitors. Searching for how others solve similar problems and not whether there are similar solutions just like what you came up with. The other part of the remedy is constantly focusing on the business KPIS and users needs, to make your success the criteria — not features and frameworks you built, but how you affected the business success and our users.
Regular practice of this behavior is important, as its challenges are regularly changing and available products and technology needs and solutions constantly evolving. It will also increase business value as it will increase regular focus on company core value for it users, and company and team advantages and uniqueness.
Remedy Patterns:
- Openly discuss clear definitions of the problem and not the solution, and find solutions that are worth your money and time. Use disagreement as a sign of other available approaches.
- Regularly search for best practices.
- Search and adopt open source solutions.
- Encourage open source involvement, to develop the thinking of what others may already developed and what others can use from our code base.
- Compromise for “good enough” solutions for needs that are not company focus or company specialty.
- Define KPIs that create and encourage focus on product and team unique values.
