There are two problem-solving approaches: 1) identify a problem that you want to solve, then find a method that will solve it or 2) pick a method you want to use, and go hunting for problems. The second way is the stupid way, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that it's the default method in tech.
Post-2010 tech, anyway.
I was reliably told that Agile (2001) fixed tech
Wait wait wait are you telling me that maybe we bought into AI before we actually had a good use case for it. That would be wild.
WDYM? There's a great AI use case. It's. Uh. It's uhhh. Hm. Well, it'll do EVERYTHING, right? Then we don't need to pick *a* use case. We'll solve all of them at once. Nailed it.
🤣
I don't recall
Binary is limiting.
How is it stupid for tech to do this? It has made many people quite rich using this method. The stupid are the people who buy the tech, in DROVES, to solve problems a marketing department just made them aware they have.
@spavel.bsky.social - As a Product Manager, we should own the problems to be solved (sizing, cost of delay analysis, prioritizing), while engineering owns solutions. It always bugs me when I see product people operating as you've described.
People say this a lot and it sounds nice but the clean separation of responsibilities in this way leads to complete nightmare outcomes. The incentives and goals must be the same, otherwise you optimize for blame over outcomes.
To clarify, Engineering may be responsible for the solution but Product is ultimately accountable and needs to be involved. Have you been on a team operating with complete separation? I've never seen that and agree it sounds like a nightmare.
Maybe you get this a lot but I really appreciate these threads! My colleagues and I spent years thinking "maybe we're just missing something that makes this all makes sense" and it's extremely validating (in the good way lol) to know that no, we're not crazy, the system is actually fucked
One of these days I will describe my ideal development framework but it will probably sound too common sense and no one will want to do it over the thing that sounds exciting and doesn't work
I had to do ITIL training and went mildly insane slowly realizing that they had just layered hundreds of insane buzzwords over the most obvious possible concepts so they could charge money for it.
The concepts being obvious is no guarantee that people are aware of them or apply them. If organizations were already applying them, there would be no need for ITIL. (Says this person who has delivered hundreds of ITIL trainings to thousands of people.)
There is no need for ITIL, and using buzzwords to disguise the concepts as more novel than they are makes them less likely to be applied and therefore less useful.
Almost every concept within ITIL was developed and established elsewhere. Where they are recognized from their original form and applied appropriately, ITIL is superfluous and potentially distracting. I haven’t seem many cases of that.
the fact that middle managers pay for your training is not proof of any need within the organization, it’s just proof that they had budget and wanted to add something to their brag doc without having to actually work.
The default method of the Trump regime and Republicans as well
It’s also the Republican method
Third way: ignore problem. ( what NYC did with Manhattan Bridge —just kept up painting it blue Until it need extensive work ~2094)
Load-bearing blue paint
Made me laugh!
It's pervasive! I’ve seen it a lot in marketing over the past few years. People find a channel they like (social media, paid search, trade shows) and then act like an audience will just show up if they stick with it long enough.
As a developer at a previous job said to me, "If all you have is JIRA, everything looks like a ticket."
So what you're saying is that we need more AI
You bring a "very good brain" to the problem. We obviously have the best brains.
I wrote my master thesis on experience based co-design in hospital services. The doctors had exactly the same problem. They never stepped into the waiting room where patients had to wait for hours but instead complained of patients being stressed or aggressive when entering the doctor's cabinet.
If it ain’t broke, keep fixing ‘til it is.
The second method is 90% of Techbro product releases.
Oh, you were talking about tech. Lol. My mistake. Thought you were talking anout a dofferent set of problems. 😅
Can we get an edit button? Or if there is one can someone tell me where? Ffs i can’t type
This sounds rather poignant after the rest of what I've read this morning...
@aelkus.bsky.social calls Trump "Tariff Otaku" precisely because of this kind of thinking - "doing tariffs" is the desired method, and any claimed problem is only a pretext for doing the desired method. Same thing with Musk and layoffs, or Republicans as a whole and cutting taxes.
I think we can add medical research to the list. Trump has decided our research on trans healthcare should be only about the downsides and are looking for people with regrets to source information from. They have the results they want to be true, now they have to find a way to pretend its real.
And apparently government
that's exactly how nearly every company, from the top-down, is doing with AI.
Almost always start with the why not the what
Tailoring requirements to solutions, for the win! /s
And this is why I struggle with the concept of AI taking our jobs.
Not unlike the approach to some academic research.
Seems to be the new default for so-called “government”.
I've referred to those things in tech often as "solutions in search of a problem that fits". Blockchain is a decent example...we turned it into currency backing math because that's the problem someone applied to it.
2) Also known as "playing".
Some solutions are illegal.
@karaswisher.bsky.social
Well that does explain the correct DOGE upfuckery
Also how our govt is being run. Ideology first.
you forgot the secret third approach: create a problem, codify the problem into law, then sell a short-term solution that will never fully solve the problem
Tech loves to talk about "moon shots," but the way tech approaches problems would require that Kennedy's challenge to the country was "we choose to build rockets!" with the destination and purpose to be worked out later
Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun
3) deny it’s a problem at all
I'm curious how many engineering students' final projects are "for rescue" in a really specific set of circumstances
The problem is a bad connection between engineering and marketing. Ideally, marketing would say "this is what there is a demand for, go make a machine for it.". What we have instead is engineering saying "We made this thing, go find a market for it."
“Hey, I just patented this molecule. What can it treat?”
One of the most common preoccupations of a product manager is looking for "product market fit" which is code for "we built something no one wants to buy" Why would you do that?? Because the core sacred devotional activity of tech is developers writing code. Everything else warps around that act.
i don't think coders are the issue here. i think it's a question of "what looks sexy to VCs" versus "what users actually want." A startup is created to appeal to VCs; then, a few years down the line, it has to pivot to something people actually want to buy when those VCs tell it to become profitable
Oh, for sure - the VC model skews incentives. But the most important way in which it does so is by creating artificially long runways that fool teams into thinking they have a successful business, and all that's left to do is crank out the code that they promised to crank out.
yeah, definitely—i'm just more inclined to blame execs & PMs for this than i am to blame engineers. the people designing the business model are rarely the ones writing the code
There's plenty of incentives to keep developers from speaking up about the brokenness of the business model, same as for everyone else. The first person to stand up and say "this system doesn't work" finds themselves ejected from the system.
oh no question, yeah
This brings us to "Agile" or "ship to learn" or "build-measure-learn" or whatever your flavor of this religion calls it. The only authoritative source of knowledge is code in production. Anything not pulled in by a metrics dashboard is framed as unknowable or speculative, and can be ignored.
it's funny because there *is* absolutely stuff you can only learn by shipping but not nearly as much as these people insist there is (and shipping is the most expensive and slowest way to get that information)
I forget if it was you who said something like "the cheapest and fastest mistake is one you don't make"
slow is smooth, smooth is fast
YES! I’ve been speaking on this for years. If you’re actually trying to solve a particular problem, building before learning is the dumbest plan. You can build something wonderful that in no way hits your target because you didn’t do the user research to know where the target even was.
How was your time at IBM?
An important part of my job is a thing called "user research" which is where you talk to people who use (or might want to use) your product to understand their problems, so that the thing you build ends up being useful for those people. The most common view of user research is "it slows us down."
Too real.
📌
Now, this is technically true! A process that takes time to do user research takes longer to complete one cycle than a process that is exactly the same except for no research. However, the thing that comes out the other side is shit. But this is only an issue if you care about solving a problem.
In my field (training and development), the late Joe Harless was known for saying "an ounce of [needs] analysis is worth a pound of [training] objectives." In sane organizations, "code shipped" is about as sound a metric as "PowerPoint slides shown per minute."
Since the default decision-making mode of tech is picking the method FIRST and the problem SECOND, it's really not that important that the method doesn't solve the problem. The successful outcome is that you got to do the method. If it didn't work, we will simply "pivot" (pick another problem).
And thus, using product practices from tech orgs that aim to find a market for what they made will not work for most organizations. Because the org has a defined problem they need to solve. The problem is the constraint.
Haters will say that "build is only the first step of build-measure-learn" but that's not actually true! After hunting for product-market fit, the second favorite activity of product managers is making a roadmap (in reality, what they make is a delivery schedule and not a roadmap, but I digress).
A roadmap typical roadmap is a 3-month block of features the team promises to ship, broken down into 2-week "sprints" (this is what makes it "Agile" and not "Waterfall"). What you won't see on that roadmap is a slot for "time we will spend redoing the work after we find out we fucked up."
Don't be silly - sure, roadmaps include time for testing, but no-one has ever allocated time to FIXING the stuff the tests show doesn't work! When I pointed out that this was kind of a major failing, the producer told me "Well, everything's just gonna have to pass testing, isn't it?"
So weird how the entire industry is obsessed with monitoring productivity, but there’s basically no consideration or accountability for technical debt and making terrible shit that conveniently becomes someone else’s problem.
So build-measure-learn does not actually translate into fixing any mistakes, because the feedback loop only fits into the timebox once. By the time you have built, it is time to build the next thing. In this context, the knowledge that the thing was the wrong thing to build is merely a burden.
This is when product managers wake up to the fact that they have all these user researchers sitting around day-drinking, and run after them for help. But instead of research, they need help with something called "validation" which is where we prove we were actually right all along.
Since we do not care what, if any, problem we are solving, validation is the perfect tool. "Find us a story that proves us right." There are various names for this. @miniver.bsky.social calls it decision-based evidence making. Wikipedia calls it Morton's Fork. Either way it's malpractice.
And what they "learn" is always "users need more features in v2". It is almost never, "we built the wrong thing" or "our process is broken" or "next time we should start with a real unmet need"
Oooh, you should definitely tell people about the idea of "tech debt". It's one of the dumbest things ever and would blow the mind of the average person.
You should really put an age-rated content warning on that post. Any mention of tech debt is traumatic to adults. Well, it is to this one.
Not the only one. Add "research/design debt" in there too. Butt shivers.
Velocity tradeoff as leverage is a reasonable choice to make, and any architecture contains any number of now-suboptimal solutions you have to live with. Then there’s shitty planning, shitty practices and shitty maintainability, which are different problems. Which ‘technical debt’?
Agile allows us to be flexible and adapt to new information! But also we don't want to go back and change anything we built because the main number we care about is velocity!
When you're a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.
This explains so much about the software I have to use.
They'd rather build the wrong thing quickly.
I’m convinced that things like “Agile” and “scrum” and “DevOps” are (successful) attempts to take basic problem-solving skills and repackage them as mysterious superpowers bestowed on only a few. What should be essential job skills turn into patented and exclusive products.
Thus proving that every word can be subverted by authorities. (“Agile” was supposed to require constant user feedback & responding to qualitative learning. It’s just that that doesn’t let executives pretend to be in control.)
This actually sets a precedent for halting or slowing innovation. All those methods you are looking for to "solve the problem" don't just come because the problem triggered an investigation, sometimes the solution was there, sitting in the corner, needing an advocate.
Sounds like #2 is the only way police and prosecutors work.
@unroll.skywriter.blue unroll pls
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Ok, I’ll bite: it’s not that dumb. A surprising number of successful drug developments, for example, have used this approach
And in politics.
It's also a common way of doing science and it's not necessarily stupid at all. Typically, someone with a problem and someone with a tool run into each other all a conference or something and everyone wins. Still, a little different than the tech version.
And of the US government
FMEA
Basically the same approach in education. They choose the thing they want to measure, which is of course whatever's easiest to measure. Then they mould education into a shape that can be measured by that criteria. "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
As an example, primary level English. It's hard to objectively judge a child's creative writing, unless you judge it entirely on explicitly taught grammar rules. So they teach grammar rules, ignoring the fact that it's not really any use for children and can drum the creativity out of them.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_...
There is a third way: Identify the problem you want to solve, and solve it in a way that creates more problems. Profit from selling the "solution"
Second method is also often the one used in politics.
@unroll.skywriter.blue Please unroll
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This guy is on fire !
The solution is always a rewrite!
Egyptians and Babylonians in 1600 BCE: identify problem, test, learn Today’s tech genius: yeah so we have this thing that eats entire civilizations and vomits up the worst things imaginable and will probably destroy us all, how can we use it to make better porn?
"Now that we have AI, we should apply it to everything!"
"If you have a Rust, everything looks like a security and performance critical application to you"
📌
The first one is really hard, though.
@camilotk.ulivre.dev o que a gente conversou outro dia
And politicians
And government now that the tech mind virus has taken hold
Funny, Republicans also use method 2.
I sincerely believe #2 is Bitcoin.
funny but exaggerated you talk about incompetent PM's who think they are the smartest in the world i did agile dev for 20 years taking into account final users at the very beginning of the evolution process and rarely faced the situation you describe
I got a better one! Create a problem that doesn't exist. Defame people who "supposedly created this problem"! Spend billions in advertising defaming these people. Then arrest them & jail them as enemy traitors! SOUND FAMILIAR!😵💫😳🤦🏼♀️🤬
3) feed all this "institutional knowledge" into an AI and lay everyone off
I doubt
both tech and politics.
I'm going to guess you have been working in this field a long time and are of the boomer generation. Am I right?
I look great for a boomer, don't I? The secret is moisturizer
You're the best looking Pavel I have ever seen
Or worse, a smart gen z with little experience. No in-between
It’s time to put Silicon Valley back in their place and out of control of our culture
Corollary with #2, avoid acknowledging any problems where the solution cannot be monetized
Every solution can be monetized if it doesn't actually solve a problem! Meanwhile solutions that do solve the problem will never make you much money at all.
"I have a hammer here. I'm looking for nails. That over there looks like a nail." 🍉🔨 "Or maybe that." 🦶🔨 "OW!"
The trick is being the hammer maker, convincing your users everything is a nail, then selling validation tools as a plug-in to protect their thumbs.
That’s the entire management consulting industry dismissed.
It is also the preferred method in politics.
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done.
Which way allows me to alienate as many people as possible??? 🧐🧐🧐
Is this how we got generative AI?
nothing makes me more confident that genAI is useless than the fact that sundar pichai is telling me that it’s useful.
If you get a new tool or learn a new method, though, it's a good idea to go looking for ways you can use it. What's bad is never developing new tools and methods.
I refer to that as CDD "CV Driven Development".
This is true in adaptive technology for disabled people, too. Can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs go around looking for “actual disabled people” to test this gadget they invented and are just sure will fix them.
3) look at problems around you and see if method you want to use can't be made to fit 4) [ I bet there's really more than two or three problem-solving approaches, isn't there? ]
I just wait till my dj revolves it
"You should all be thinking about how we can use AI..."
Decision Intelligence
AI has tainted the word intelligence, we have to come up with something else to describe the ability to use logic to make decisions
Decision Intelligence is as yet untainted
Nah. just use *human* intelligence in conversation. Or come up with your own word and share it with us =)
I agree that starting with the problem and talking to people is the best way to solve it. At the same time tremendous numbers of successful tech products have been built in the last 30+ years so a lot of companies must be getting it right. Including some that seek PMF and “pivot”.
Im not saying “all the survivors do this, therefore it is good”. I’m pointing out that there are survivors despite this “default” and so perhaps there are multiple routes to success. Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore the other factors and circumstances to learn more? Is it all just luck?
We can take the example of OpenAI, which loses more money than anyone has ever lost before building a product with no use case, as a learning opportunity about what factors contribute to success. But I am not sure whether the lessons learned are the ones we ought to teach.
Default method in tech? It’s the MO in our current clown show gov’t.
It's the default method a lot of places. The ol' adage "when you only have a hammer, everything is a nail" and all that
As long as chocolate is the answer, I don't care what the problem was.
for learning & educational purposes, it is not such a stupid method...
So so so so true.
For people selling solutions you are entirely correct. For those of us who spent their careers solving problems you are entirely wrong.
The wonderful thing about this is that everyone thinks they are the exception
The industry as a whole, really, is a technical solution to a social problem
Great thread! Having spent much of my career working in product development or adjacent to it, I saw the quality of the practices degrade justified by the pursuit of the ever elusive "efficiency".