Throughout my career, I’ve always leaned heavily on an innate bias for action. Whenever I hear an intriguing or challenging problem to solve that can deliver real value, I want to dive in and start coding straight away.
That approach is probably fine when working solo, but when on a team and have stakeholders other than yourself, that’s a risky way to go about solving problems.
Instead, I’ve found that it’s critical to spend lavishly upfront on getting in sync on the requirements and goals of the task or project with others. Talk is cheap, while writing code, especially code that may miss the mark or get thrown away, is expensive.
That begs the question, when is it time to break ground and begin work? There’s no perfect answer, but it’s essentially when you and the stake holders are in hard sync on the approach and/or desired outcomes of the project.
This may seem trivial or obvious, but doing the mental work upfront is quite difficult for people who are biased toward action. If that’s you, you might find remembering and practicing this to make you more productive over the long-term.