Boris Cherny wrote a short note for his team and then posted it publicly: the six steps he runs on almost every problem and product, and why the loop is supposed to feel unstable while it works.
- Understand the information available
- Gather the missing information
- Define the problem
- Define a clear and simple approach to solving it
- Define a goal
- Act with urgency to achieve the goal
New information arrives mid-flight, so steps three through five get rewritten and the loop repeats — many times, on complicated problems. He names the feeling directly: “this can feel thrashy.” The churn is healthy as long as everyone knows it is the process, because the only way to actually solve the problem is to update your priors when the data changes.
The useful part is where it breaks, which is not where most process writing points:
- The two failure modes he sees most often are failing to define the problem clearly, and failing to define an approach that is clear and simple.
- Either one missing produces the same symptom: elaborate plans and vague success criteria.
- For complicated problems, unclear thinking is hard to spot from inside your own plan. That asymmetry is the argument for real-time feedback from someone outside it — and he expects the same feedback back.
He leaves the framework itself on the table too: if part of this meta-process is meta-wrong, he is open to changing it.
Two things stand out. Effort is scheduled at the end — five of the six steps are thinking and only one carries urgency, which is a claim that slowness is usually upstream rather than downstream. And being wrong is treated as the cheapest instrument available rather than a cost, which is why the note ends where it does: it more clearly defines the problem, points at the right solution, and shortens the learning loop.
That is a review checklist you can run in a stuck meeting: state the problem, state the approach, ask whether it is simple.