The Fastest Path to Building the Wrong Thing

Let me paint you a picture. You send me a DM saying:

“We need a Salesforce integration.”

Or maybe:

“Can we use AI for this?”

Or the classic:

“Build me a dashboard.”

Here’s what just happened: you skipped the most important part of the conversation. And you just made the path to solving your actual problem longer, not shorter.

The Problem With Bringing Solutions

When you bring me a technology solution, you’ve already constrained our options to what you can imagine technologically. That’s no knock on you. Knowing what’s possible is my job, not yours.

Three things go wrong the moment you prescribe the fix.

You’ve anchored the conversation. Instead of exploring the problem space, we’re now debating implementation details of a solution that might be solving the wrong problem entirely.

You’ve hidden critical context. Somewhere in your head is the actual pain point, the thing that made you think “dashboard” in the first place. I need that, not your interpretation of the fix.

You’ve bet your part-time intuition against my team’s full-time expertise. That sounds harsh, I know. But you don’t tell our CFO which accounting software to buy. Extend me the same courtesy.

”But Aren’t We Supposed to Bring Solutions?”

I can already hear it: “Wait, I thought we’re supposed to bring solutions, not problems. Isn’t that Leadership 101?”

The advice is fine. The application is off.

“Bring solutions, not problems” is about ownership within your domain. Don’t dump complaints on someone’s desk and walk away. Do the thinking. Take accountability. If something’s broken in your world, show up with ideas for how to fix it.

Respecting domain boundaries across functions is a different thing entirely. When your sales team has a pipeline visibility issue, you absolutely should bring solutions, to your sales leadership. You know that domain. You have the context.

But when the solution you’re imagining lives in my domain (technology, architecture, systems), the advice breaks down. Bringing me a well-framed problem is you doing your job well. It respects that I have expertise you don’t, the same way I respect that you have expertise I don’t.

Think of it this way: if you walked into the CFO’s office and said “I think we should restructure our debt using a leveraged recapitalization strategy,” would that be bringing solutions? Or overstepping into a domain where you’re not qualified to prescribe? The right move is: “We have a cash flow timing issue that’s constraining our ability to invest in growth. Here’s the impact. What are our options?” That’s bringing a solution: a well-articulated problem with clear stakes and an invitation to collaborate.

Domain Expertise Goes Both Ways

You are the domain expert. You understand your customers, your operations, and your market in ways I never will. That’s incredibly valuable.

When you come to me with a technology prescription, you’re doing my job (badly) while hiding your expertise from me. What I need is your domain knowledge in its raw form: the pain, the constraints, the cost of inaction. When you translate that into “build me a dashboard,” you’ve stripped out the nuance that would let me propose something you’ve never heard of, something that might solve your problem in a fraction of the time.

What I Actually Need From You

Instead of a solution, bring me a problem statement with constraints. Four things:

1. What’s the pain? “Our ops team spends six hours a day manually reconciling transactions.” That’s gold. I can work with that.
2. Who feels it? One person, a team, your customers? The answer changes everything about how we prioritize and design.
3. What’s the cost of inaction? Help me understand urgency and scale. Are we bleeding money? Losing customers? Just annoyed?
4. What does success look like, in business terms? Not “a dashboard” but “I can see X in real time so I can make Y decision before Z happens.”

Give me those four things and I’ll give you options. Maybe one of them is the thing you were going to ask for. Maybe it’s something better. Maybe it’s something that already exists and you didn’t know about.

How This Plays Out

Here’s a story I’ve watched unfold more times than I’d like. The names change; the shape never does.

A vendor needs access to some of our data. The request lands as a solution: “We need API access to this reporting tool.” Straightforward, right?

Except the API might not support what they need. So maybe direct database access instead? But that requires new data models, and the pipeline is already fragile. Could we push files to object storage? SFTP? What about the support platform, it has an API… but notes there can leak to customers, so that’s a risk. Full admin access, then? Except admin can move money, and we’ve never let a third party write to it before.

Weeks pass. The channel swells to a dozen-plus people across multiple teams. One technical solution after another gets proposed, debated, and abandoned. The person who owns the request ends up as a translator between teams, relaying objections they only half-follow. Somebody eventually asks the obvious question: what’s the timeline, the business impact, the expected value?

Nobody answers it. Buried deep in the thread, someone finally mentions what the vendor actually does. But what a vendor does and why we need them are two different sentences, and only the second one is a business case. A real one sounds like: “This vendor needs to correlate support conversations with our internal data to speed up resolution. Today that takes X hours and costs us Y. We believe we can cut that by Z.”

Nobody says that either. By the time I’ve read the whole channel, top to bottom, I still can’t tell you what problem we’re solving. I’m guessing. The VP of Technology is guessing.

That’s weeks of churn and a lot of smart people’s attention, spent debating five flavours of plumbing for a problem no one ever articulated. The team meant well and knew their stuff. They just started with “we need access” instead of “here’s what’s broken and here’s what success looks like.”

The Real Win Here

Forget turf. This is about speed and outcomes.

When we respect domain boundaries, when you bring me problems and I bring you solutions, we skip the dance where I reverse-engineer what you actually need from what you asked for. We skip the part where I build exactly what you requested and you realize three weeks later it doesn’t solve the underlying issue.

The fastest path to building the wrong thing is a stakeholder who’s already decided what to build. The fastest path to the right thing is a stakeholder who trusts me enough to share the problem and let me do my job.

So next time you’re about to say “we need an integration” or “build me a tool,” pause.

Tell me what’s broken. Tell me what hurts.

Then watch what happens.