Problem

thoughts on different kinds of problems

Hackney April 2020

1. Getting to know you

I like problems because the way people see problems reveal so much about their personality and way of thinking. If you ask someone about a specific problem, you can immediately tell if the person is more logical or intuitive; guided by engineering principles, experiences, emotions, or pure intuition. In a big company like TikTok where I was previously working, I could often tell, without doing any research beforehand, who was working in external-facing roles and who was more internal-facing. Simply by the way they approached, and spoke about, problems (naturally, different stakeholders).

2. Problems are urgent

Every time I tell my therapist about my problems, like being awake all night because of anxiety, she keeps pushing back telling me don’t see them as problems, see them as areas of improvement! I used to think it made sense because everyone on the internet and my therapists and all my friends told me to avoid negative language when talking about myself. But the truth is, I became better at managing my own brain when I switched my narrative from I need to improve this to I have a problem. No one likes people who tell others they have problems, but for me, it helped. Areas of improvement sounds like the features you put on a product roadmap somewhere but everyone forgets them when more urgent requests come in. Problems sound urgent. A problem sounds like something you want to get rid of as soon as possible because life will be easier if you do.  

If your anxiety or fear or your bad self-esteem is blocking you from the real things you want - love, freedom, connection, wealth, health, whatever it is - then yes, you have a problem. It doesn’t matter why you are anxious, it’s all justified and there are reasons why you are like this, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a problem and nothing less.

3. Problems in small and big companies

In a big company, you have to put so much effort into unblocking. In a small company, there are hundreds of paths to take across a wide, open field. The problem is not finding the path or moving forward, but knowing what paths are good and what paths will waste your time. In a big company, there are also hundreds of paths but you know exactly what paths are good and bad, however, the ground is covered in rocks and it can’t stop snowing. You know you’re on the right path but the rocks on the ground are heavy and you don’t know who is strong enough to remove them. Most work is focused on unblocking, removing barriers, and finding people who can carry rocks. 

4. Process problems

Many integrity issues are maintenance problems. Policy, safety, misinformation, all of it. All these problems are changing over time and are subjective in nature. They are process problems and nothing to “fix”. You can only really improve the underlying subcategories of problems; identification, detection, and verification. People say stuff like "social media is ruining democracy" and I suppose some people could see it this way, but the real problem is they can’t detect and act on stuff like misinformation and hate speech and all these things fast (and accurately) enough. Because it’s just very complicated, as you might have understood after my previous posts about content moderation and body image online.

5. Many little drops make an ocean

From a problem perspective, working in venture capital was really really fun. You get to talk about problems every day, some you’ve never heard about before, and you learn so much about different industries. You also learn, kinda, how to pick up what is an issue, and what problems appear to be bigger than they are. Just because people talk about things as problems doesn’t mean they are. When I asked founders what problem they were solving, they always described the larger picture, like “we are fixing food waste” or “we are challenging the big banks”. While these statements were always confusing to me, I suppose they are effective for the sake of storytelling. After this grandiose opening, we continued to discuss other obvious problems within their niche, such as clunky regulatory frameworks being a blocker in the financial industry. Which it is, but it’s just the limits of the society you live in. They are process and maintenance issues, and rules you have to consider when you design your product, not problems you can fix. I loved hearing about the day-to-day problems. The less sexy ones. It sounds cooler saying you are challenging the big boy banks than talking about how you ensure “Deliveroo12424” and “Deliveroo$2n3n” both return as Deliveroo and are placed in the same category (food or restaurants?) in your budgeting app. All big problems can be divided into hundreds of subproblems, and for me, those are the ones that matter, because they tend to be more actionable. Not easier, but more tangible.