Problem Solving

How much of my job is problem solving? Pretty much all of it. Sometimes you'll show up on set and, you know, something is broken. Something has fallen behind on schedule. Or you show up to a live event and the artist that you're supposed to be covering is still getting ready or they're not even there. (gentle music) You know, first approach is sit down with people, understand how they view it, and then formulate your own definition of the problem and get everybody on board. Then you get into an exploratory phase. Okay, what are gonna be the key inputs and outputs that allow us to make this decision? What is gonna be the first version that we can do that kinda points us in the right direction, even if it's not the perfect one so that we can try that out, get it in front of the people that we're working with and really experiment with those results? The first solution that comes to mind is not always the best solution. So taking the time to take a step back, understand what the problem is, and then also brainstorm different ideas on how to solve it. Being able to communicate with your team and decide collectively on what the best choice is, I think, is the path that we take or we try to take most of the times in our company. As product managers, we tend to have pretty clear ways that we solve problems. Really, the flow of things is there's a research phase where you try to learn a lot about the space, and that's through talking to customers or users, reading forums. So once you get all that information, trying to think about how that relates to the problem. Is there, you know, an approach that you want to copy? What mistakes are out there that other companies have gone through can you learn from? Then, really, just writing that as a comprehensive, cohesive document and getting everyone on board with it. And even though that's how things work in product management, I think it's, you know, generally applicable to a lot of areas. The first step to take in problem solving is communication. You never want to have anyone assume something on your behalf, so just taking the one step ahead and making sure you're covering every aspect that you might have missed and communicating it with the, you know, the people above you and the people below you. I think that's really important. The way that you become a higher up individual within an organization is they need to see that you're someone where you can solve problems. You don't necessarily need to come to the right answer. It's more important to show that you have the right thought process. But if they're not taking a good approach, or if they're someone where they're kinda just taking a bunch of guesses and kinda throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks, if they're not willing to improve on that process, then they're going to have difficulties later on. In an interview you want to have one, I hate to use the word canned, but canned example that you can provide pretty quickly and that could link to many different things (laughs), because that's something you want to demonstrate whether they specifically ask how you solve problems or not. So just always have, you know, you don't want it to be something where the problem was your fault, ideally. And you don't want it to be something where you went against policy to solve it, ideally. Give an example or two during an interview of, okay, here's a problem I faced. Here's how I kind of assessed the problem, deconstructed the problem, and then this is what I did to solve it. And then, you know, tell me were you successful or not? Because, you know, sometimes you're gonna try to solve a problem and you won't be successful. And, you know, my personal opinion is, based on experience, you know, you tend to learn as much, if not more, from that than you do when you're successful. (gentle music)