Put your best practices away!
Discipline, care, and responsibility are important; we owe our customers, employers, team members, and families to take our work seriously. At the same time, though, we need to play. If we don’t occasionally break out of the mold of our “best practices,” we can easily miss many wonderful ideas, some of which can bear rich fruit.
This is my second article on my series on Solutions Engineering. In this article I’d like to explore the idea of forgetting the best practices from time to time, and letting our passion take over. But thinking about it, it applies no matter the role. And just like everywhere, if you want to be good, you first need to learn the rules.
I have always admired the work of Why The Lucky Stiff. He was a whimsical, prolific ruby computer programmer who wrote programs in the most unusual way using creativity as the main driver. Although he decided to withdraw from the online community, he derived some of the most elegant DSLs to express complex problems easily — always with a cartoon or song to explain. He is famous for having written why’s poignant guide to ruby, a programming book unlike any other. Even if each of Why’s projects were radically different, they had one thing in common. He constantly reinvented the rules, and he inspired people.
In my previous post, I explained how the mission of a Solutions Engineer is to make customers projects successful. Which means product knowledge is core to be a good Solutions Engineer. It might seems obvious, but without knowing the gotchas and edge-cases, how are we to best advise our customers? And yet, I don’t think knowing all that makes us a great SE. Nope, that’s not enough. Once we know everything, we need to put our best practices away.
Fine, you can put them aside. But not away!
Okay, remember that thing you always advise your customer not to do? Well, what would happen if you did it? Probably nothing good. Hey, but what if it unlocked a new usage? And what about this obscure feature no one really knows about, could it be used for something else, something completely different than the purpose it was created for?
Once we drop the constraints, we have much more freedom and it expands the solution space. It allows us to test some ideas based on our domain expertise, product knowledge and with the help of our software engineering skills. Doing that, in my opinion, is one of the best ways to deepen our expertise and gain credibility. It’s also this sweet spot where our profile is the most interesting as SE, which makes it an incredibly powerful exercise for driving innovation.
It’s also incredible fun to do!
When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.
― Why The Lucky Stiff
While we should act as trusted advisors, experimenting will only make us more knowledgeable and result in even better advice. It gives us material for conferences, allows us to discover new usages, and if not, will make us learn a great deal in the process.
