Why Problem Statements Aren't Enough<br>Shine Garg

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Jun 13 • 7 min read<br>Why Problem Statements Aren't Enough

~10 minute read | Read in browser ​

By Shine Garg

Staff+ Career Coach | Former Staff Engineer

Over the first three editions, we looked at why your career can feel stuck despite strong work: limited influence, the execution trap, and work that sounds smaller than it is when the context around it is missing.

Together, these patterns point to a deeper question:

So what actually helps your work become trusted, adopted, and valued at a broader level?

Some of those capabilities are obvious: technical depth, strong execution, and reliability. But others are easier to overlook.

One of the most important is contextual range : the ability to understand the technical, organizational, and business context around your work.

From the last edition, we know that context changes the perceived value of your work. This edition goes one layer deeper:

Where does strategic context usually live?

Most of the time, it is scattered across people, teams, systems, incentives, and priorities. You have to uncover it.

The three types of strategic context

Most organizations have three types of strategic context:

Technical context

Team or organizational context

Business context

Technical context is the context software engineers are usually most familiar with. This includes the codebase, system architecture, tools, infrastructure, technical constraints, and technical vision and strategy.

Team and organizational context is how work moves through people and teams. This includes team goals and dynamics, cross-functional dependencies, collaboration patterns, ownership boundaries, deliverables across departments, and alignment with company priorities.

Business context is about the business itself. This includes customer needs, product direction, revenue targets, market competition, profitability, board or shareholder expectations, and the risks or opportunities the company is trying to manage.

Each context answers a different question:

Technical context tells you what can work in the system you actually have.

Team and organizational context tells you what can become real.

Business context tells you what is worth pursuing.

Here’s one way to represent these contexts:

Engineers, managers, and leaders often pay attention to different parts of the same strategic context.<br>Needless to say, these are default starting points rather than rigid boundaries. Strong engineers, managers, and leaders can all operate across all three contexts.

But different job functions tend to enter the same problem through different default focuses.

Engineers may start with system design and code correctness, reliability, and maintainability. Managers may start with team capacity, ownership, coordination, and adoption. Leaders may start with business risk, investment, opportunity cost, and long-term leverage.

This is also why “it depends” is such a common answer in software engineering. At its best, “it depends” is a signal that the answer depends on context rather than a universal truth.

The more mature move is to ask: What context are we missing?

That question becomes even more important as your scope grows.

The problem statement is where the work begins

A few months after I joined a new organization as a Staff Engineer on the platform team, I was given a classic one-line problem statement:

Build a Pub/Sub system for the company.

On the surface, this can sound like a technical infrastructure project. Choose the right messaging pattern. Evaluate the right technology. Design the system. Build it. Get teams to use it.

But the one-line problem statement was only the beginning.

At the time, the organization had ~200 engineers and was primarily a Ruby shop, with some greenfield projects beginning to adopt Golang and limited use of Python in the Data org.

Different teams had already found bespoke ways to solve their asynchronous service-to-service communication needs.

Some had adapted Sidekiq as a de facto Pub/Sub system. Others were using Twilio Segment, a customer data platform system, in ways that looked more like internal event distribution.

These choices made sense locally. Teams had problems to solve, and they used the tools available to them.

But across the company, the lack of a golden path was creating fragmentation, duplicated effort, and architectural debt. Anti-patterns were proliferating. New features took longer to...