Victor Palacios

Find the right problems, then solve them right

My driving force is figuring out what the right problems are and then solving them well. I lean on Design Thinking as a framework for identifying the right problems and Agile as a way to solve them effectively. In practice, these are two parallel, never-ending processes: continuous discovery and continuous delivery. The outputs from discovery feed directly into delivery.

The power of contextual inquiry

By far the most impactful technique in all of this is contextual inquiry — going out and observing real people doing real work in their actual environment. After just a few rounds, the right problems to solve become ridiculously obvious. There’s a caveat: it requires an open mind to see them. Roughly 16% of end users are curious and driven enough to be genuinely excited that someone is asking about their pain points. They become your allies.

What I look for

• Look for hacks and workarounds — when someone has duct-taped together their own solution, that’s a massive signal pointing at a problem worth solving.
• Widen your mind aperture — explore areas adjacent to whatever you’re working on. Some of the best insights come from how other industries solved analogous problems.
• Question whether a step is needed at all — what would happen if we just deleted it? Take that thought to its logical conclusion.
• Get comfortable throwing away work — clinging to the wrong solution is more expensive than starting over. The hardest part is letting go when the evidence says you should.

Ask forgiveness, not permission

In most corporate environments, you’re expected to stay in your lane. For people like me, that’s almost physically impossible. So I don’t wait long. I start looking for opportunities to run contextual inquiry sessions with end users on my own. The hard part comes after — once you’ve discovered the right problem to solve, you face the arduous task of convincing leadership. I’ve spent anywhere from three months to two years on this part alone.

Find your opposite

I’m great at finding the right problem, less great at the disciplined follow-through needed to deliver a polished solution on time and on budget. So the hack I use is to find my opposite — the most conscientious, detail-oriented, plan-the-work-and-work-the-plan person on the team — and pair up. The explorer finds the right problem; the executor gets it built and shipped. When it clicks, it’s the most effective working dynamic I’ve experienced.