How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer
- ID
- 17391
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 24 Aug 2026, 3:23 AM
- Fetched
- 26 Aug 2026, 5:01 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://lalitm.com/post/find-problems-staff-engineer/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 26 Aug 2026, 6:09 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
Lalit Maganti explains that he finds high-impact problems not by blocking out calendar time to 'think strategically,' but by absorbing the stream of day-to-day complaints and friction people mention in meetings, chat, and email. He digs past feature requests to find root problems, asks users what outcome they actually want, and lets connections between seemingly unrelated issues surface over time. He notes this works best in bottom-up engineering cultures with roadmap autonomy, and may not apply in top-down environments.
Why it matters
If you're trying to move from senior to staff level—or trying to find what to build as a founder or indie hacker—stop waiting for someone to hand you a problem and stop trying to brainstorm from a blank page. Instead, systematically log the complaints and friction points you hear in normal conversations, then look for patterns. The highest-impact work often comes from solving problems leaders haven't yet noticed, not from executing on assigned tasks.
Discussion angle
Compare Maganti's 'absorb problems, not requests' approach to how you currently decide what to build—do you have a system for capturing ambient complaints, or do you only react to explicit tickets and feature requests?