Leaders, let’s give our teams permission to talk about problems

You've probably heard this bit of business advice before: If you want to be a good employee, don't bring your leader problems, bring them solutions.

Most of the time, this advice makes sense. Leaders shouldn’t be responsible for solving every little issue that employees encounter, and leaders should expect their teams to be responsible for creating solutions. Teams should feel empowered to make decisions.

However, in the context of product development, there can be a tendency to avoid talking about any kind of problems, including user and customer problems, and to jump straight to delivering something. This tendency to avoid problems hurts us.

If we don’t spend time naming and understanding problems—really digging deep into what we call “the problem space”—we end up delivering messy software, creating disjointed service experiences, or wasting development time on rework.

I see this all the time in delivery-driven spaces.

People are so afraid of talking about problems—sometimes even shamed for talking about problems—that they jump straight into delivering a “solution” with no real purpose. Bloated software. Tools that never get adopted. Feature factories. Bridges to nowhere. Churn, churn, churn.

So leaders, let’s change the message.

Let’s give our teams permission to talk about problems. Let’s invite inquiry. Let’s do real discovery research. Let’s democratize learning and encourage understanding. Let’s make room for systems thinking. Let’s reframe problem identification as both a safe and smart thing to do.

I encourage you to give your researchers, designers, product managers, and engineers permission to share problems with you and with each other. I encourage you to get comfortable with it. Help them get comfortable with it. We can even make problems fun by reframing them as puzzles to solve.

Leaders: Understand that this change starts with you. It’s not a sign of weakness in either you or your team to spend some time talking about problems. Yes, you should expect your teams to deliver solutions, but you can make room for them to understand the variables and think through the puzzles first. Making room for the right problems will make room for the right solutions to emerge.