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Right Problem Leverage

Pattern · engineering-culture

Core Concept

Choosing the right problems to solve can be a tremendous source of leverage. The difference between great engineers and good engineers isn’t just speed — it’s problem selection.

You don’t need studies to know that engineers vary by orders of magnitude in their output of all-things-considered usefulness. Compare, say, my output with that of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: they’ve clearly been at least 10x more productive, probably more like 100x. But that’s not just because Jeff and Sanjay can solve individual problems 100x faster. Instead, they gave themselves leverage by choosing the right problems to solve.

— “10x (Engineer, Context) Pairs”

Implications

For individual engineers:

• Speed of execution matters less than what you choose to execute
• Great engineers spend more time understanding the problem before coding
• “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points” — changing your viewpoint can boost your impact more than working harder

For engineering leaders:

• Your job isn’t to solve problems for engineers — it’s to help them find the right problems
• This connects directly to intent-based leadership: give engineers the business context and let them choose the highest-leverage problems
• Preventing a problem is better than solving it — the highest leverage move is making problems disappear entirely

For organizations:

• “Electricity or Blood?” is a problem-selection framework: directing human effort toward problems that actually require human judgment
• Prioritization is the organizational version of problem selection

Related Patterns

• Prioritization Reveals Leadership — the leader’s version of problem selection
• Challenge as Compensation — great engineers want to work on the RIGHT hard problems
• Solve the Meta-Problem — adjacent: problem selection (this pattern) vs. problem reformulation (meta-problem). Both increase leverage through different mechanisms.

Cross-References