Feeling the Pain, A Framework For Solving Obscure Problems
I don’t tend to have too many mantras when it comes to engineering leadership, but one key saying that I keep coming back to over and over as the years progress is, “feel the pain.”
No, this isn’t some riff on “no pain, no gain,” it’s more about problem identification and problem solving.
In this case, the pain is not physical, it’s more the emotional pain or the difficulty to get something done. Whether it’s with software or within an organization, you have to feel the pain and sometimes you have to experience it in order to really get a sense of how to solve the problem. I’ve helped build out Triage processes at three separate organizations and have used this methodology at each. It’s a few simple steps, though the timeline for each is different:
- Identify the real problem
- Feel the pain yourself
- Let others feel the pain
- Rid the pain together
The goal for all of this is solving the problem, solving the right problem, and making future solutions faster. You’ll never be able to gain all the necessary context that your stakeholders have in their brains, but you can short-circuit the solutioning process.
