An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

The elements that I’ve found effective for solution validation are: Write a customer letter. Write the launch announcement that you would send after finishing the solution. Are you able to write something exciting, useful, and real? It’s much more useful to test it against your actual users than to rely on your intuition. Identify prior art. How do peers across the industry approach this problem? The fact that others have solved a problem in a certain way doesn’t mean that it’s a great way, but it does at least mean it’s possible. A mild caveat: it’s better to rely on people you have some connection to instead of on conference talks and such, since there is a surprisingly large amount of misinformation out there. Find reference users. Can you find users who are willing to be the first users for the solution? If you can’t, you should be skeptical whether what you’re building is worthwhile. Prefer experimentation over analysis. It’s far more reliable to get good at cheap validation than it is to get great at consistently picking the right solution. Even if you’re brilliant, you are almost always missing essential information when you begin designing. Analysis can often uncover missing information, but it depends on knowing where to look, whereas experimentation allows you to find problems that you didn’t anticipate. Find the path more quickly traveled. The most expensive way to validate a solution is to build it in its entirety. The upside of that approach is that you’ve los...