10+1 Steps to Problem Solving: An Engineer's Guide by Sario Andrew

Author:Sario, Andrew [Sario, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2020-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 15 - Normally Open vs Normally Closed

Open The Box

In a job interview for a technology retail store, I got asked “You’re in the store and approach a customer.

If they asked about a product feature you had no idea about, without checking the internet, looking it up or asking someone, how would you find out?”

Naturally, I rambled through a bunch of options that were still variants of asking someone else. For clarification, you couldn’t see inside the box, and the product details on the box did not have the information either.

They narrowed the question down “The box is for a toy, and they wanted to know if it came with a specific adapter”.

In my mind, I thought if it’s missing as a feature on the box, we can likely assume that the manufacturer didn’t include it because they would want to show off all their features to potential customers.

So my answer was to explain to them I don’t know off the top of my head, but based on the information we have, I wouldn’t assume it had it since they didn’t advertise it on the box. Then offer the customer to go and find out if they were still curious.

This answer was, okay.

The best answer was-

“Open the box”.

I thought, wait, am I allowed to do that? But let’s be honest. I didn’t consider it because I was worried about the rules. Otherwise, I would have asked them if I’m allowed to open the box.

The point is, sometimes you have to go and check for yourself. Maybe it’s not on the datasheet or the manual, but if it’s something you can go and look at, check – similar to what we said in Step 5.

So what have we learned in this chapter? We learned reading the manual is valuable, and you might find the answers there.

We know reading the manual and writing a manual for your investigation plan is recommended. By writing, this manual, we have all the failure modes considered, and we know where to want to plant the eyes for the investigation.

With this plan, you can build a chain of tests to undertake to attack the problem and give you as much data as possible with slightly varying circumstances to analyze later.

We also know that writing things down helps our brain process information and checking information as close to the source as possible can be helpful, particularly if the information was an old label or document written down by someone else in the past.

In some situations I’ve been in, someone from a company that doesn’t exist wrote the source information.

The icing on the cake?

They wrote it over 20 years ago, and they don’t even make the product anymore.

We all love good documentation. You even curse the person who left you with poor documentation. So use this step as an excuse to start documenting the solution better for future you.

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