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The Feature No One Asked For
Last year, I watched a product team spend six months building a feature no one asked for. The execution was flawless.
The code was elegant. The launch went perfectly. And two months later, we quietly deprecated it because the problem we thought we were solving turned out to be imaginary.
The team hadn't failed at building. They'd failed at questioning. And I've done this more times than I can count-worked weekends, rallied people, solved the problem in front of me with precision, only to realize months later I'd been optimizing the wrong thing entirely.
The painful part isn't the wasted effort. It's that being good at execution can mask the fact that you're pointed in the wrong direction.
Problem-Given vs. Problem-Found
The Distinction That Changes Everything
Problem-Given is what lands on your desk. Someone frames it, you solve it. The parameters are set, the question is clear.
You execute well, deliver on time, and everyone's satisfied. It feels productive because it is-within the frame handed to you.
Problem-Found is what you uncover when you stop accepting the framing. It's asking whether the question itself is right.
Whether the constraint is real. Whether solving this particular problem actually moves what matters.
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60–80% of project failures
Most failed initiatives weren't executed poorly — they solved the wrong problem from the start.
— Standish Group CHAOS Report
Why We Default to Problem-Given
Most of us spend our careers in Problem-Given mode. Not because we're incapable of others, but because Problem-Given is what organizations reward. It's measurable. It's safe. It produces visible output.
And here's the trap: the more competent you become at Problem-Given, the more requests you get for it.
You become the person who ships. Who executes. Who gets it done. And slowly, without noticing, you stop asking whether 'done' is the right destination.
The Competence Trap
Problem-Given work can be done with confidence. The path is clear. You know when you're done.
Problem-Found work requires you to sit in uncertainty longer, challenge assumptions that feel settled, and risk looking like you're slowing things down.
This isn't about intelligence. It's about what gets rewarded. Organizations love people who execute without questioning. Until the thing they built turns out not to matter.
One Filter Before You Solve
Before I solve, I ask: Does solving this create new options or just complete a task?
If it creates options-new ways to think about the situation, new paths forward, new questions worth asking-that's a signal I'm working on something that might actually matter.
If it just completes the task, I haven't necessarily found the right problem yet. I'm just executing someone else's framing.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Your boss asks: "How can we speed up our approval process?"
Problem-Given approach: Map current steps, identify bottlenecks, streamline workflow. You deliver a 20% faster process. Everyone's happy.
Problem-Found approach: Why do approvals exist? What decision are we protecting against? You discover the approval was created for a risk that no longer exists. The real solution is removing the approval entirely, not optimizing it.
The first approach completes a task efficiently. The second creates new options and might eliminate the task altogether.
Both feel productive. Only one questions whether productivity is pointed in the right direction.
Most of what we call "solving problems efficiently" is just getting very good at answering questions we should have questioned first.
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Execution Isn't Enough
The better you are at solving problems, the less often you stop to ask if you're solving the right one. That's the paradox of competence.
The hardest part of effective work isn't execution. It's learning to pause long enough to ask if you're solving for the right thing.
When was the last time you questioned the problem itself instead of just solving it? Reply and tell me what changed.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
— Albert Einstein
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