What is the problem we are trying to solve for?
For real...What..is...it?
I believe that, as a culture, we are taught so much about solving problems that we often don’t focus on understanding the problem itself.
“Oh, I fell down, I’m hurt.”
“Alright, let’s clean it up and put on a Band-Aid.”
Or, “I told you not to run fast—see what happened?”
Blame or jump straight to a solution. There’s no in-between.
As an EA, I see this mentality carry over into work as well.
“Our sales are down.”
“See, I told you not to set such a high target.”
Or, “Alright folks, let’s put in more hours to fix it.”
What we should be doing instead is asking:
“Why are sales down? What’s the root cause? Why aren’t the strategies we thought would work actually working?”
We have to sit with the uncomfortable feelings.
So many of my discussions in the EA space revolve around:
“What happened? What went wrong? How did it go wrong? What wasn’t working?”
And not just with engineering teams—but also with product, program, and business teams.
As a skilled EA, you should slow down the pace of the conversation to dig deeper into these areas and shed light where the cobwebs are. Too often, rushing to a solution proves to be a shot in the dark. Sometimes it works out; most times, it fails.
Once you’ve done enough discovery on the problem, the business goals, and the root causes of the issues you’re facing, the outcomes and outputs will become clear.
For example, let’s say sales are down. You collaborate with your product and business teams to perform a root cause analysis. They come up with:
“We didn’t have enough analytics to predict whether we were going to meet our sales target.”
Do you think that’s a good root cause? No! The absence of something cannot be a root cause.
What do I mean? They’re essentially saying, “If I had more analytics, I’d be fine.” But what they should be saying is, “Our sales team didn’t have the right information to make informed decisions about our sales trajectory.”
The first statement is output-based; the second is outcome-based.
The first one is asking for a hammer and looking for a nail.
The second one is asking for a toolset.
If the EA focuses on the first root cause, they’ll deliver a state-of-the-art analytics platform.
If the EA focuses on the second root cause, they’ll pull data quickly from various systems of record and deliver an XLS spreadsheet that solves the sales team’s problem with the least possible time and cost.
The key here is Outcome vs. Output!
Outcome is the value you want to drive.
Output is the means through which that value is delivered.
The root cause should inform the outcome, not the output.