Talk about the problem not the solution -

My favorite thing about building a product is that it is really hard.  It is hard for a lot of different reasons, but one that has become blatantly obvious is that communication is not something that comes naturally to human beings.  We like to think it does, but it doesn’t. 

And in most cases in order to build a product groups of people have to communicate with each other.  And not just in the half ass way we can get away with in our day to day life where we are sort of listening and half understanding what the other person is saying.

When you are building a product every logical thought, action, assumption, & objective is crucial to the success of the product.  You need to understand everything that is being communicated to you and you need to be able to effectively communicate to others everything you are testing, working on, building, dreaming etc. 

What makes communication even more complex here is that most “groups of people building a product” are usually made up of very different personality types.

On a micro level we can take a start up for example which is often comprised of a designer, hacker, and hustler.  Right brain designer/artist, left brain logical/engineer, and middle brain art/logic combined. 

I like to think I fall in the hustler middle brain art/logic combined category.  I went to school to be an artist and spent years 1 - 24 of my life on stage performing, but now @ 27 I’m writing code and committing to github every day.

I think this combination allows me to see things from a unique perspective. 

Steve Jobs wrote:

When I went to Pixar, I became aware of a great divide. Tech companies don’t understand creativity. They don’t appreciate intuitive thinking, like the ability of an A&R guy at a music label to listen to a hundred artists and have a feel for which five might be successful. And they think that creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined, because they’ve not seen how driven and disciplined the creative folks at places like Pixar are. On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people. I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline.

I like that I can understand both sides of the communication melt downs.

In doing so, I’ve learned one of the biggest mistakes “nontechnical” people make when communicating to great hackers about product is that we try and tell them the solutions before we ever tell them the problem.  It’s like we don’t trust them to be able to think through and reach their own solution.  When in reality their solution is usually 10-100x better than ours because they are the ones building it!! 

I started thinking about this and realized maybe its because nontechnical people don’t realize the value they’ve created just by finding the problem. Truly, just being able to find and articulate the problem is really valuable when building a product.

But here I go again, trying to offer a solution: “Non technical people love yourself and know just finding the problem is valuable!” instead of just talking about the problem :)  So, I’m done! 

Talk about the problem not the solution!