How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer

Summary

“How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the work he’s assigned. He also needs to get involved in figuring out what his team and org should be building.Someone else had suggested blocking out time in his calendar to think about the bigger picture. He’d tried that, but hadn’t found it productive, so he asked if I had any alternatives.I told him I rarely find good problems by staring at a blank page and trying to “think strategically.” Instead, I act like a sponge. I listen to the stream of day-to-day noise, absorb the problems people are having and let them sit in the back of my mind. Over time, some fade away while connections begin to appear between others that initially seemed unrelated. Eventually, I start to see what’s really slowing people down and what my team or I can do about it.I’ve worked with many engineers who’ve never really tried this. They wait for managers or leads to identify opportunities, then demonstrate their value by solving the hardest assigned problems. That can absolutely lead to promotion. But the projects that have made the biggest impression in my career were the ones where I found and solved an important problem my leaders did not yet realize existed.One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way.Absorb problems, not requestsPeople love talking about the problems they are facing: in meetings, chat threads, presentations and email. They explain why their work is hard, complain about what slows them down and describe what they wish they could do.When something overlaps with my area, I start pulling on the thread. I might ask, “If X existed, would it solve your problem?” ...