Are you a Ticketmaster or a Problem Solver?
Improving your self-worth by associating a sense of purpose with your work
Let’s begin this post with a fable I have heard the Freshworks CEO Girish often repeat. I later came to learn that this is an adapted version of the Parable of the Three Stonecutters propagated by Peter Drucker’s book The Practice of Management.
A curious person stumbles upon a construction site where a lot of people are busy working hard. Huge rocks and boulders are spread out everywhere, and the workers are busy chipping away at them. The curious person walks over to one of the workers and asks them - “Excuse me. What are you doing?”. The worker replies - “Can’t you see? I am breaking stones.” Not satisfied, the curious person walks over to another worker and asks them the same question. This time the proud response is -”Oh! I am building a temple.”
We can embellish this fable further by imagining the body language of those two workers. The person who identified themselves as a stone-breaker was certainly working hard, but probably had a sombre look on their face. The person who identified themselves as a temple-builder was working equally hard, but was cheerful and engaged in their work.
Although, Drucker used this parable to teach a lesson in management, let’s use this like Girish would - to teach us the value of finding meaning in one’s work.
I am Closing Tickets
Imagine yourself walking in to the (virtual) floor where an engineering team is heads down, tucked away behind their monitors, clicking away at their keyboards. You might walk over to an engineer and ask them - “Excuse me. What are you doing?” The engineer might say - “I am fixing a bug”. Or if you are lucky - “I am fixing a P0” - which is short for - “I am really busy, so don’t disturb me right now!”.
You are looking for the person who instead goes - “Ahh. I am building a recommendation engine that should improve the installation rate of apps on our Marketplace.” How do you find this person?
Well, that’s not really important. How do you become this person? Or if you are a leader, how do you get more of your team to think like this?
Start with Why
Made famous by the Simon Sinek book of the same name, it is good to be reminded, especially in this era of exploding AI capabilities, that what differentiates us from robots is a sense of purpose. Or at least an association with one. I can certainly power through my tickets on the issue tracker without a sense of purpose other than closing the tickets, but the quality of my work is vastly improved with the additional motivation.
Why does my work matter? What can I help achieve as part of this team? How does it all add up? Why should I be doing this to the best of my abilities?
Now, we are not all so fortunate to be working in industries that end poverty or solve for hunger or mitigate climate risk. That does not mean we cannot derive purpose from what we spend energy on.
For example, here are a few that have worked both for me and the teams I have worked with.
Build a world-class engineering team from here in India
Outdo the current B2B SaaS platform leaders in Developer Experience
Generate new revenue streams from a platform service and achieve the magic $1M ARR milestone
(In my younger days) Live up to the expectations of my senior mentors
Leaders are tasked with defining the mission and sense of purpose for their teams, as well as repeatedly drumming this into the hearts and minds of their team members. It is equally important to help associate not just the projects, but also common day-to-day activities with these same ideas.
However, don’t leave this to fate and an articulate leader. Ask probing questions to derive these ideas and associations for yourself.
Distill it Up
Now, in real life, what we noted during a casual stroll through the office floor is the reality for most people. Their work comes down to resolving tickets. It is easy to forget that somewhere in the past someone took a business problem, or an engineering problem with a meaningful business impact (like scale or reliability), and distilled it down to these very tickets. That business problem probably derives from the overarching sense of purpose you cared about, or at least could be easily associated with it.
It therefore becomes important to regularly revisit your day-to-day in light of the mission you and your team are on. You are either reminding yourself and putting your work in context, or your leaders are regularly distilling your work upwards reminding you why you are solving the problem you currently are. Or as they say, don’t forget to see the forest for the trees.
Outcomes vs Output
If you are dealing in tickets, you measure progress by how many tickets you have closed or resolved. This unfortunately gives you a false sense of progress. As a knowledge worker, especially so if you are in product or engineering, you are in a unique position to identify and solve problems - that is essentially the definition of your job. Solving problems is more endearing than closing tickets, more so if you identify yourself as a problem solver.
Whether it is improving the discoverability of apps in your App Marketplace or the frustrating manual chores you have to perform each time you release a change to production, each problem you help solve is an outcome that can be visualized and celebrated. Try celebrating a record equalling feat of ticket closure in comparison.
Problems Galore
If you are in a position where you haven’t figured out what excites you most, it’s OK. We have all been there. Can you start by just being curious about what aches your own work, your team’s work or its envisioned outcomes? You are bound to stumble upon a multitude of problems waiting to be addressed.
Why do the builds take longer than they should?
Why do we see more free apps than paid ones on our Marketplace?
Why does it take so long to upgrade to a new runtime version?
Why do we see a spike in customer reported bugs after each major release?
Why is it so hard to understand and make changes to this piece of code?
You don’t need to care about all of them; just whatever floats your boat enough.
I have enjoyed working with great engineers who obsessed about optimizing the use of cloud infrastructure, and others who obsessed about the user or developer experiences their work created, while some others who made it their mission to accelerate how soon our changes went to customers. A handful even made it their mission to groom and mentor young talent, in the spirit of paying it forward.
Timing is Everything
Solving problems in a business is as much about timing and opportunity as it is about the effort and intention. When the time is right, you can expand your current scope of work to solve long-pressing problems in the vicinity of what you are working on. When the opportunity arises, you can take on previously deferred problems and put them to bed once and for all. Talk with your manager or mentor to understand which problems are currently relevant. Great managers are always looking for these serendipitous opportunities.
One simple way to expand your scope is to deploy the Boy Scout Rule and leave your current playground better than you found it.
Maybe you add comments to a piece of code you took hours to wrap your head around. Better still, you refactored it and added self-descriptive tests for it.
Maybe you introduce a long-pending step in automation because you needed to do this manually once too often during this current task.
Maybe you got tired of working around a bug you frequently ran into and fixed it for good.
Maybe you found missing requirements in what your product manager wrote up, and brought them up to help make the new feature well-rounded.
You Choose
Whether it is through fixing these broken windows or contributing meaningfully toward solving a currently relevant business problem through your own ticketing work, it is easy to imagine a satisfied smile on your face at the end of a hard day’s work.
Seen objectively, it was just a bunch of tickets that you closed. But you chose to instead make visible progress on problems that matter to you and your team. Now that’s something worth getting behind, isn’t it?