The Problem With Heroics: Building Systems That Make Problems Easier to Solve

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside teams across Vivint and NRG, spanning Product, Program Management, Business, Support, and Engineering, to improve how we identify, triage, and resolve operational issues.

Reflecting on where we started, where we are today, and where we hope to be six months from now, one lesson continues to stand out:

Technology challenges are rarely just technology challenges.

When an issue takes too long to resolve, technical complexity may only be part of the story. Information can be incomplete. Ownership can be unclear. Priorities can compete. Different teams can have very different views of the same problem.

It’s easy to treat each of those situations as an individual problem to solve.

Eventually, though, you start asking a different question:

What is it about the system around the work that allows the same friction to keep happening?

That shift in mindset mattered.

Instead of looking for one big fix, we focused on strengthening the fundamentals: better intake, clearer ownership, shared visibility, regular prioritization, and stronger communication between the people closest to the problems.

One of the biggest differences came not simply from communicating more, but from communicating better. Creating the right conversations, with the right people, at the right time changed how quickly we could understand and act on problems.

When the documented process doesn't match how work actually gets done, people create their own routes. Eventually those routes become tribal knowledge, and that is much harder to scale effectively. During that time, data helped us understand where to look. Conversations helped us understand why. Partnership helped us decide what to do about it.

Perhaps most importantly, improvement didn’t require asking people to work harder. It came from removing ambiguity and making it easier for people to work together.

That experience has reinforced a few principles I continue to carry with me:

Clarity creates speed. Consistency creates trust. Partnership creates lasting improvement.

There’s a familiar saying, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” I’ve come to appreciate a similar idea in engineering and operations: sustainable speed rarely comes from moving faster at all costs. It comes from removing the friction that makes us slow in the first place.

Healthy operational systems shouldn’t depend on heroics. But we’ve all been there. Sometimes someone jumps in, knows exactly who to call, connects the dots, and gets the problem across the finish line. Hell I know I've been that person more times than I'd like to admit. Being a hero isn't the issue~

The problem is when heroics become the process.

Strong fundamentals make the right problems visible, put them in front of the right people, and give those people the clarity and ownership to act. Just as importantly, healthy teams need enough trust to say when something isn’t working, challenge assumptions, and change course. Creating emotional safety and space for this growth is essential to growth at scale.

That becomes especially important when replacing legacy systems, processes, and ways of working. Change can be painful. Friction isn’t necessarily evidence that the change is failing. Sometimes it exposes the assumptions, dependencies, and workarounds we’ve accumulated along the way.

And there will always be more to improve~ That might actually be my favorite part!

Anyone who has worked closely with me has probably heard me jokingly say:

“I’m excellent, but I’ll get better.”

This mantra adapted from my grandfather usually gets a laugh, but underneath the joke is something I genuinely believe.

Being proud of how far you’ve come and recognizing how much further you can go aren’t contradictory ideas!

We should celebrate progress. We should recognize the people who made it possible. And then we should keep asking how we can make the system a little clearer, a little healthier, and a little better than we found it. Cheers to you and everyone out there holding out and finding your "Strong Ground" (great book by Brené Brown check it out!) in a turbulent world of exponentially changing frameworks.