I recently completed 11 months at my first full-time job, as a Product Engineer at Openhouse, an early-stage startup based in Bangalore. My day-to-day responsibilities include collaborating with the Product Managers, Engineering Manager, and other able members of the product team to discuss, and eventually solve problems and build new features. During my tenure, I have been fortunate to work with developers, professionals much senior to me in terms of experience, and with a vast intellect. If for me, there has been one key takeaway, it has been that in order to solve a problem, you must first ask the right question(s).
It is parallel to what data scientists say — gathering data is never useful as long as you don’t know what questions to answer from it.
It is a skill that should come with time, and experience. However, perhaps a conscious effort of working on it may help exponentiate how well one can exercise it. It can contribute immensely to one’s problem solving skills.
We’ve been told as students to ask questions in the classroom, oft even prompted by professors to ask the same question repeatedly. Although, if the question is not comprehensive and well laid out, the person who asked may never receive a satisfactory answer.
In the workplace, I think it comes down to precision, effort, and resource management.
I believe the more comprehensive and precise you are with the details of your question, the words you use, and in the opposite scenario, your answer, the better you’ll convey your point and also set the right expectation. Simply asking someone can they deliver a certain task on a deadline, compared to asking them to provide an estimated number of hours, will help set the right expectations, and help others plan their tasks.
If you are a developer, asking the right questions can help you account for all kinds of impact to your code when you’re building a feature, or making a production level fix. Just asking how the introduction of a new feature may impact the old & existing users, or what happens to the existing flow, can save large amounts of unnecessary development time, and future code breaks.
Andy Hunt, in his book The Pragmatic Programmer, mentions the importance of Critical Thinking. He mentions 5 key tips to regulate critical thinking, which I feel can be applicable to developing the skill of asking the right questions I so mention:
- Ask a question, and get an answer. Dig deeper by asking “Why?” Repeat as if you were a petulant four-year-old (but a polite one). You might be able to get closer to a root cause this way.
- Who does this benefit?
- What’s the context?
- When or Where would this work?
- Why is this a problem?
As I mention above, it is a skill that should come with time, experience and repetition. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask many questions, it will slowly funnel you towards asking the required one.
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