A senior engineer asked Lalit Maganti (Google, Perfetto) how to find problems worth working on while making the jump to staff. The answer isn’t blocking calendar time to “think strategically” at a blank page — it’s acting like a sponge: absorbing the stream of day-to-day noise until connections appear between problems that initially seemed unrelated.

Absorb problems, not requests

  • People constantly talk about what’s hard — meetings, chat threads, email. When something overlaps your area, pull on the thread: “If X existed, would that solve it?”
  • Users ask for a particular solution, not their root problem. Keep digging until you understand what they’re actually trying to accomplish and why existing products don’t work.
  • Ambient listening suits introverts — no speculative meetings needed; the information is already flowing around you.
  • When a problem seems worth exploring, see it firsthand: sit with the team, walk through workflows, reproduce the bugs yourself. That separates what they need from what they asked for.
  • Seek out people who see more of the org — owners of critical systems, cross-team folks — and ask what interesting problems they’ve noticed. They’ve often already connected the dots.

Let problems accumulate

  • Moving too fast burns you: build a feature a vocal team wanted, watch them barely use it. Enthusiasm in the moment isn’t the same as importance.
  • Waiting is a superpower. The same problem surfacing in different teams raises its priority; surface-different problems can share a shape; sometimes the requesting team didn’t care much at all.
  • Make a mental note (or write it down, whatever works) and revisit if the problem comes up again — keep unresolved problems around long enough for evidence to accumulate.

Find the common shape

  • Perfetto example: over two years, teams kept requesting small UI additions — pinned tracks, zoom presets, custom aggregations. None of them wanted their specific feature; each wanted to personalize Perfetto without imposing on everyone else. The underlying need was extensibility → shipped as macros + extension servers.
  • Best untangling happens on long, aimless walks — not by forcing solutions at a desk.
  • Caution: a common shape is only a hypothesis; elegance is not evidence. His transparent-caching idea for Perfetto traces collapsed on scrutiny — the two problems wanted genuinely different solutions, so he split the design in two.

Pressure-test before building

  • Low-risk and useful → act immediately. Unsure → throwaway prototype. Big and convinced → full commitment, including the hard yards of building support.
  • You’re also convincing yourself: be willing to stop, or park an idea until it becomes an org priority.
  • You don’t have to be the builder — shaping the right problem has impact even when someone else implements it.

Solving useful problems finds the next one

  • People remember genuine interest and help; they start coming to you earlier and bring you into wider conversations.
  • Success builds trust through long-term stewardship — eventually your judgment carries weight without you owning every project.
  • Staff engineering isn’t replacing technical work with meetings and coordination; conversations are inputs to what you build, not the end result.

The takeaway: finding problems worth solving isn’t separate from the job. It comes from staying engaged with people’s work long enough to see what no single request can show you.