Importance of Problem Obsession in Engineering

Problemeering: Engineering the Problem Before the Solution What is it? Problemeering (problem + engineering) is the art and science of identifying, defining, and framing problems so they can be solved more creatively and efficiently. Why it matters Many product launches, business strategies, and even personal projects flop because they target the wrong problem or never define one at all. Problemeering helps you: • Understand the real issue • Avoid premature “band‑aid” fixes • Uncover root causes and hidden opportunities • Frame challenges in a way that sparks breakthrough ideas Key steps Observe & Empathize – Listen to users and spot pain points. Define – State the core problem in one crisp sentence. Reframe – Challenge every assumption: “Is this really the problem?” Explore Context – Map the ecosystem, constraints, and stakeholders. Ask “How might we…?” – Turn the problem frame into innovation prompts. Quick example Late‑delivery complaints in a food‑delivery app. Instead of jumping straight to route optimization, a problemeering mindset asks: • Are customer expectations realistic? • Does the UI overpromise delivery times? • Are restaurants accepting orders they can’t fulfill? Addressing these upstream issues often fixes “late deliveries” more effectively than tweaking maps alone. Origin Not yet in the dictionary it just reminds us: engineer the problem first, then engineer the solution.

Engineers have an interesting relationship with impossible problems. We complain about them and lose sleep over them, yet when someone offers us an easier project, we find a reason to say no. For lack of a better term, I have started calling it the "Engineer's curse." I have always been drawn to problems without obvious answers. A client needs something by a date that seems unreasonable, or the budget does not quite match the ambition. Or it could be that the people involved do not yet agree on the path forward (which is typical for engineering teams). These situations should feel like burdens, and sometimes they do. But there is also something underneath the frustration that feels like purpose, a quiet thirst to figure out what nobody else has figured out yet. And over the years, I have learned to recognize this same quality in others as well. It looks like restlessness when things are too predictable, an inability to let go of a problem, even when walking away would be the sensible choice. The engineer who keeps turning something over in their mind during dinner is not doing it because they have to; they simply cannot help it. The leader who volunteers for the difficult conversation knows that leaving it unresolved could do greater damage. I used to think this was a flaw, this inability to leave well enough alone. Now I see it differently. The curiosity that pulls you toward the hardest problems is the same curiosity that eventually pushes you to solve them. If you have ever looked at an impossible situation and felt something closer to excitement than dread, you probably know exactly what I mean. And if you lead engineers, learn to spot this quality early. It is one of the most valuable traits a person can bring to your organization.

We made this mistake in the early days of Apptimus - getting too attached to our initial solution instead of staying focused on the core problem we aimed to solve 😬. I've seen many founders and product teams make the same mistake. ⚡ Why is this dangerous? - A solution that works for one user demographic may not work for another. - Technology, market conditions, and user behavior are always evolving. - Sticking to a rigid solution can make you blind to better alternatives. 🚀 How do you stay problem-focused? - Deeply understand your users: Their pain points, motivations, and real needs. - Be flexible: Be open to pivoting or evolving your approach based on real-world feedback. - Experiment & iterate: Keep testing different approaches, measuring impact, and refining. - Stay data-driven: Let user insights, not assumptions, guide your decisions. A great solution today might not be the right one tomorrow. But if you obsess over solving the right problem, you’ll always find the best path forward. When did you have to pivot or rethink your approach? Let’s discuss. #ProductDevelopment #Startups #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #UserFirst

🎬 Episode 4: Helping Teams Fall in Love With the Problem Because solving the right problem beats building the perfect solution. Scrum Masters and Coaches — let’s talk truth: 🚫 Too many teams get stuck chasing “done.” ✅ But the best ones chase understanding. You want innovation? You want real impact? Then don’t rush to the solution. Teach your teams to sit with the problem. Dissect it. Empathize with it. Fall in love with it. ____________________________________________ 💔 The Problem with Solution Obsession: Teams often jump from idea → ticket → delivery …but skip the most important step: Why does this matter? That’s how you end up with well-built features that no one uses. ___________________________________________ 💡 Shift the Focus: Problem First, Always As a coach, you can guide this shift by: 1️⃣ Creating Space for Discovery → Before story refinement, ask: What’s the actual pain point here? Have we heard this from real users? 2️⃣ Using Problem Statements, Not Just User Stories → Encourage teams to craft “How might we…” questions to explore the problem fully. 3️⃣ Bringing Customers Into the Room → Literal or metaphorical. Use feedback, data, recordings — anything that keeps the user real. 4️⃣ Celebrating Curiosity → Praise questions like: “Do we need to solve this now?” “What if we didn’t build anything?” Curiosity drives clarity. 5️⃣ Zooming Out, Regularly → Revisit product goals. Are we solving isolated issues… or moving toward a larger outcome? _________________________________________________ 🔆 The Power of Problem-Centric Coaching: ✅ Teams build smarter. ✅ POs prioritize sharper. ✅ Products grow with purpose. And you? You become the coach of clarity — the one who unlocks thinking before building. ______________________________________________________ 📌 Are your teams solving problems… or just delivering solutions? 💬 Share one way you help teams explore the why before the what 👇 👥 Tag someone who leads with curiosity. #AgileCoach #ScrumMaster #ProblemSolving #ProductMindset #AgileLeadership #FallInLoveWithTheProblem #DesignThinking #LeadingTheProductMindset #Episode4 #LinkedInSeries

The only question I ask when my team shows me something new: "What problem is this solving?" It stops most conversations dead in their tracks. Why? Because most of the time, they don't actually know. We've become solution-obsessed: → Building things that look impressive → Creating systems that sound advanced → Implementing tools that feel innovative But without a clear problem, solutions are just distractions. What happens when you ask this question: → Vanity projects die immediately → Real priorities become clear → Resources flow to actual bottlenecks → Team alignment happens naturally The best teams don't chase solutions. They obsess over problems. Because when you truly understand the problem: → The right solution becomes obvious → Implementation becomes focused → Results become measurable → Impact becomes inevitable Stop asking "What can we build?" Start asking "What problem are we solving?"

Why Understanding the Problem Matters More Than the Solution Early in my career, I believed the fastest person to provide a solution was the smartest person in the room. Experience taught me something different. A few years ago, a client approached us with an urgent request. They already had a solution in mind and wanted us to execute it immediately. Instead of jumping into implementation, our team spent time asking questions. What is the actual business challenge? Why is this happening now? What does success look like? What constraints are we working with? After several discussions, we discovered something surprising. The proposed solution was addressing a symptom—not the real problem. By identifying the root cause, we recommended a completely different approach. The result? ✅ Lower project cost. ✅ Faster implementation. ✅ Better long-term scalability. ✅ A happier client. That experience reinforced an important leadership lesson: Great engineering isn't about building faster. It's about understanding more deeply. Whether you're estimating a project, designing a system, managing operations, or leading a team, the quality of your solution will never exceed the quality of your understanding. Before proposing answers, ask better questions. Because... A well-understood problem is often halfway solved. As leaders, our responsibility isn't to have the quickest answer—it's to ensure we're solving the right problem. What's one project where asking the right questions completely changed the outcome? I'd love to hear your experience in the comments. #Leadership #Engineering #Operations #ProjectManagement #ProjectEstimation #ProblemSolving #CriticalThinking #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #Draftsourcing

When it comes to problem-solving, rushing to find quick solutions overshadows the importance of deeply understanding the issue at hand. This can lead to superficial fixes that fail to address the root cause, resulting in recurring issues and stunted innovation. The challenge lies in shifting focus from a solution-first mentality to a problem-centered approach. Without a love for the messiness of process, organizations miss out on the depth of insight and innovation that comes from truly understanding an issue. Cultivating a passion for challenges involves embracing a mindset that sees challenges as opportunities for: ↳ Growth  ↳ Learning ↳ Innovation. This means slowing down, asking better and deeper questions, and encouraging a culture that values curiosity and exploration over immediate resolution. By creating an environment that sees the beauty and opportunity in challenges, your organization can unlock a richer, more innovative path to success. #ProblemSolving #Challenges #Curiosity #Solutions 📸 Photo Credit: Sahar Coston-Hardy

The Best Network Engineers Spend More Time Troubleshooting Than Configuring When many people start their journey in networking, they believe the real skill lies in configuration, knowing the right commands, setting up routing protocols, creating VLANs, and building topologies that look beautiful on a whiteboard. And yes, configuration matters. It’s how networks are built. But as experience grows, most engineers discover a different truth: the real art of networking is troubleshooting. Configuration is often structured and predictable. Vendors provide documentation, labs simulate deployments, and templates can guide even complex setups. But real networks rarely behave exactly like the lab. Things break in strange ways. Interfaces remain up while applications fail. Routing tables look perfect, yet packets never reach their destination. That’s where troubleshooting becomes the real test of an engineer’s understanding. Great network engineers develop a habit of thinking like investigators. Instead of rushing to change configurations, they pause and ask questions: 1. Where exactly is the packet being lost? 2. Is the issue happening in the control plane or the data plane? 3. Could this be an MTU problem? A routing loop? Asymmetric traffic? Troubleshooting forces engineers to go beyond memorizing commands. It pushes them to understand how protocols actually behave, especially when something goes wrong. And today’s networks make this even more important. Modern infrastructures combine on-prem networks, cloud connectivity, overlays, security appliances, and virtualization. A small misconfiguration or subtle interaction between systems can cause problems that aren’t immediately obvious. In those moments, dashboards and configuration files only tell part of the story. The real answers often come from packet captures, traffic analysis, and careful observation. Interestingly, the engineers who earn the most respect in the field are rarely known for the number of technologies they can configure. Instead, they’re known for something else: their ability to walk into a failing network and calmly figure out what’s actually happening. They follow the packet. They question assumptions. They connect the dots others miss. Because every outage tells a story. And the best engineers know how to read it. In the end, configuration builds the network, but troubleshooting reveals how deeply an engineer understands it. And that’s why the best network engineers don’t just configure systems. They spend more time learning how those systems behave when things go wrong.

We go through tons of math and physics problems in STEM education. And yet, we fail to leverage the most important learning: modeling. A typical engineering problem might look like this: "Consider an elephant of mass X at the top of an inclined plane of height Z and angle Y. The elephant slips and rolls down. Determine how long it will take to reach the bottom." Then comes the killer note: "Assume the elephant is a perfect sphere with uniform density and no friction." At this point, the problem is no longer engineering, it’s just math. The student plugs in a formula, solves for time, and moves on. But real engineering isn’t about solving equations. It’s about making decisions and solving problems. A better approach? Remove the note. Now, the student must: ✅ Define assumptions. Is friction negligible? Is a perfect sphere reasonable? Probably not, but making that assumption gives a lower bound for time. ✅ Question the real-world implications. How does shape affect motion? How does friction change the problem? ✅ Recognize uncertainty. Maybe the elephant gets stuck. Maybe it never reaches the bottom. Now, the student is forced to reason about bounding the problem rather than just computing a single number. This is engineering. Not just applying formulas, but thinking critically, defining problems, and managing uncertainty. Too often, we strip engineering problems of the complexity that makes them worth solving. But real-world engineers don’t get neat assumptions, they get messy, ambiguous, imperfect systems. We should teach students to think like engineers, not calculators. How can we improve problem modeling in engineering education?

The smartest engineer I knew was burning out. Not because of the work. Because of how she experienced problems. A database migration would keep her awake for three nights running worst-case scenarios. Missing requirements turned into week-long analysis spirals that paralyzed her. Each technical challenge felt like a personal failure waiting to happen. Her code was flawless. Her solutions were brilliant. Her confidence was disappearing. But every problem felt like pressure instead of what it actually was. Growth. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹. It's how they relate to problems. In engineering, problems ARE the work. If every challenge feels like pressure, your career becomes heavy. Here's the framework that makes that shift practical: 𝗦.𝗢.𝗟.𝗩.𝗘. 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: 𝗦 → Stop the spiral  ↳ Before your mind runs ahead, pause. Most stress is not the problem itself, it's the story around it. 𝗢 → Observe clearly    ↳ What is actually happening here? Not the worst-case version. The real version. 𝗟 → Limit the scope  ↳ Shrink the problem to something you can act on. Clarity grows when scope gets smaller. 𝗩 → Validate one step  ↳ You don't need the full solution. You need the next useful move. 𝗘 → Extract the lesson  ↳ Every problem solved strengthens your thinking. That's how confidence is built, not assumed. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁? The next database migration came six months later. She didn't lose sleep. She mapped the dependencies, identified the first move, and started working. When uncertainty showed up, she didn't spiral. She paused, scoped it, and kept moving. Same problems. Different relationship. Her confidence rebuilt itself one solved challenge at a time. The problems didn't change. She did. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you're a woman in engineering feeling stuck or struggling with your next career step, let's talk. Send me a DM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ❤️ Repost to help someone see their problems differently   🔔 Follow Dima Abu-Khaled for personal and career growth techniques