So What, Who Cares?

One of the most difficult parts of post pandemic work life, has been how to connect on a human level with your colleagues. I know personally I’ve done a ton of experimenting to figure out ways to solve it, but one of the folks on my team (Noah Harris) had a great idea, to have an interview section at the top of our full team meeting, so that we would start to get to know more about our colleagues and possibly find inroads to start conversations with one another.

We ran with it, and I’d been a ton of fun getting to know more about everyone, but one of the wrinkles we added that I really loved was, when you were the interviewer in one meeting, it meant the next meeting you had to be the interviewee. So you’re constantly learning about new people and new things that they’re interested in.

This whole preamble isn’t what today’s post is actually about, it’s just to set up my story lol. And the reason is, in a recent interview my bud Julian asked an AMAZING question and I wanted to answer it (but I wasn’t being interviewed so ya’ll get it here instead).

The question was, what’s a piece of advice that when you got it, you shrugged off or thought it wasn’t for you, but turned out to be 100% true and useful?

My mom was (maybe is, since she still will correct anyone’s grammar at any time) a high school English teacher. And while it was great to have someone built in to check all my work and make sure I was actually learning everything I needed to learn… often it was a gigantic pain in the ass. Because she’d (accurately) point out where I wasn’t doing as well as I could. And so, I had to keep on doing more work to actually get to the level of quality that she knew I was capable of.

Secret time, sometimes it’s better to not have people know what you’re capable of so you can just coast, but that’s a different story lol.

Going back as long as I can remember, whenever I had to write ANYTHING the first questions my mom would ask me were “so what? who cares?”

Mind you, she’s used to giving this spiel to high schoolers who are already so surly that nothing can make them MORE surly, but as a kid, hearing that felt like daggers (I’m not mad Mom, remember this is about advice that I now feel like is my philosophy so… don’t worry lol). Like why WOULDN’T someone care about what I have to say! How dare they! I am speaking or writing and that should be enough!

And let’s be clear, my immediate retort in my head was “TEACHERS ARE REQUIRED TO READ MY WRITING SO WHO CARES IF THEY WANT TO”. Which is a a very self centered response but… I was a kid. What do you expect lol.

At this point, I have to ask myself… so what, who cares? Why did that matter, and why does it matter to you and also why is this at all about empathy and even MORE importantly what on earth does that have to do with engineering?!

Let’s tackle these questions one by one.

So what, who cares?

I’m taking this as one question even though it’d be easy enough to argue it’s two questions. But really it’s not meant to be. Because you can’t answer one without answering the other. And the whole point is going back to another post, that in your working life, everything ends up being a sales role. And the first thing you have to decide on when you’re trying to sell someone on something (as you do in argumentative essays!), is to understand why you’re making your argument, and then why someone would care about why you’re making your argument.

As an example (and we’ll dive further into this one in the future, but let’s just use it as a framing device for now), when I was working at FIS, I was building these proposals to modernize our mobile frameworks. And a large part of the time I spent wasn’t on the specific technical changes that we wanted to make. Instead it was what’s the problem I’m trying to solve (so what), and who that will impact/be important to (who cares).

In that specific case, the solve was that mobile releases were taking too long, they were too complicated, and they required too many manual interventions. So the so what I argued in favor of was simplification. As we increase complexity, we increase points of failure, which increases the likelihood of failure. Reducing that complexity therefore reduces the points of failure, reducing the overall likelihood of failure. Solving that question of “so what” allowed me to frame the discussion to some very critical and key points, that in the end allowed for a focused presentation.

But just saying all of that isn’t enough to drive decisions. Getting to the what is obviously important, but without answering “who cares” you can’t get to the IMPACT of making those changes you’ve defined in “so what”.

Taking the impact of making these changes and defining the people and groups that will be impacted takes your argument from theoretical to real. So calling out that we have an entire team of people who are just deploying apps to stores, and they’re just every day clicking buttons in the App Store and Google Play, where we can free them up instead to do actual client comms, better serving our clients, all while also taking a typical release from a 6-12 month process to a 1-2 week process, shows the impact to our support teams, our direct clients, our end users, and overall the speed to market that we can provide to our business teams.

Pointing out the problem isn’t enough. Pointing out the solution isn’t even enough! You have to connect it to value. So you have to be able to answer… so what, who cares?

What does that have to do with empathy?

I know this might seem very obvious… but let’s just assume that I’m seeing it as obvious in my head but isn’t clear outside of it lol.

The thing that feels obvious after years of being “in it”, is that you can’t answer the “so what, who cares” question without having empathy for both your subject and your audience.

So what needs empathy to be able to look critically not just at your argument, but also all the counter arguments. You need to understand not just how things are but why they are that way. Going back to our previous example at FIS, one of the reasons that their solution was so complex and had so many opportunities for failure was due to the fact that the mobile solution was originally built by a start up. So the solution needed to obfuscate the end point data to ensure that FIS retained their own IP. But then FIS bought the mobile solution, and as a result didn’t NEED that layer of obfuscation. But it persisted because people felt it was “necessary” due to the way the solution was architected!

You can’t tear that solution apart without realizing why it existed in that way in the first place. Just saying “get rid of all this junk” doesn’t solve the problem, it’s showing a lack of understanding of why we are where we are and what pieces are actually critical versus the ones that just seem critical.

And once you’ve had that empathy for your solution, it again doesn’t matter if you don’t have empathy for your audience. Business people don’t care if you have a layer of obfuscation causing problems for you. They just want to know how you’re going to make the product better. So arguing for the change isn’t enough, it’s why does this make life easier for your teams, or better for your clients, or how does it save you money. And that empathy is required because you also have to tailor your conversation to your audience.

Pitching this to my boss in the engineering world was entirely different than pitching it to the business folks that had the money to invest, or to the team that needed to do the work, or to the folks that were doing all the App Store uploads, etc.

That level of empathy isn’t something that comes naturally. It requires constant re-examination of what you’re trying to accomplish and who your stakeholders are. And sometimes that requires you admitting that you don’t know! And then you have to stretch that empathy muscle. Which leads me to…

**How is this engineering?! **

I’m going to oversimplify here — but engineering is the how. We’ve got our so what. We’ve got our who cares. We’ve got the fact that you need empathy to answer either question. But then the engineering portion is, how do we do it. Engineers are always looking for solutions to problems. You tell them what you want to accomplish and they’ll be able to find at least 5 or 6 ways to do it.

The problem that you need to think through as someone leading engineers or working with engineers is to not just say “here’s my problem, solve it”. You need to have empathy for your engineering team and give them guard rails and reasons for what you’re trying to do. If you simply say “I need this system to be simpler”, or “this isn’t working great, fix it”, or “I’m seeing a lot of negativity in the App Store address that please”, you’re going to get a shitty response/result.

That’s because you’re not being empathetic toward your solution or your engineers. Engineers need that so what who cares answer too! And often they’re neglected. They get shitty user stories, that have 1/3 of the context needed, then they go out and develop an elegant solution to the problem they think they’re solving only to have some UX or Business person swoop in to say “no not like that”.

As leaders of engineering organizations, we need to be more cognizant of the way we treat our people as well as our solutions. Because in the end, engineering, whether it’s software, hardware, architecture or any other endeavor it’s a manifestation of humanity. And humanity is messy and requires empathy to provide people with solutions that will actually solve their problems.

The biggest worry I have in writing something like this is the inevitable response of “so what who cares”. Which seems silly but it’s true. I’m here in the epilogue thinking “did I actually do what I accomplished? Is this any good? Will anyone care? Will anyone think I’m saying something new or interesting?”. And on the one hand, it can be tough because I don’t truly know the answer. I used whatever empathy I had to ensure that I was following my gut toward an answer, but that’s not always enough. But I also think that is ok. Because a part of going on an empathy journey is giving YOURSELF the grace to be wrong, to fail, to let things fall and see what you can do better the next time.

So while I want all of you to also be asking “so what, who cares?” — I also don’t want that to cripple you. I want it to enable you. To empower you. To see that there’s always ways to keep refining your methods and refining your skills in empathy to create better solutions, and dare I say… a better world.