A few years ago, I started a new job. My position was adjacent to someone who was consulting with the company and considering joining full-time. They were incredibly bright, very accomplished, oh, and they hated me from the start.

I don’t blame them. They were certainly more qualified in the space than I was, and I could tell they wanted a chance to interview me before the company extended an offer.

Early on, I realized there were three points of friction to working with this person:

1. Right before I started, this person drafted a proposal for something that would directly impact my work, which would make my job a lot harder and saddle my team with a bunch of avoidable responsibilities. I now had to work upstream against this defacto incumbent approach.
2. This person was so smart and highly educated that they were almost impossible to understand sometimes. Both in the level of detail they’d get into and the word choice they used.
3. Every idea I proposed was met with the quip “that’s not a solution”.

We’re ignoring the first two. This post is about the third.

When they said it

My first reaction to hearing “that’s not a solution” was that it was frustrating in how dismissive it is. This person didn’t always propose an alternative. They just said no to the only idea out there, seemingly uninterested in creative problem solving together.

Sometimes they were correct. Or it was a solution but not the best one. A handful of times we went through with my idea and it was fine.

My biggest takeaway in the moment was that it was beneficial to have a very senior member of our engineering team looped into these meetings. This didn’t stop “that’s not a solution” from being said, but adding a neutral third-party helped keep the conversation on track and mediate through the specific problems with the idea instead of dismissing it altogether.

Reclaiming it

A funny thing happened. In the year or two after I stopped working with that person, I had upleveled a lot. And occasionally someone would pitch an idea, and the first thought to my head was, “that’s not a solution”.

Almost any time a middle manager wanted to change vendors for our data tools? That’s not a solution.

Our CAC wasn’t good enough on a channel the marketing team liked, so we needed to change the CAC formula? That’s not a solution.

I never actually retorted “that’s not a solution”. I assumed it would come off as condescending, the same way I felt when it was said to me. I worried for a moment, was I turning into a jerk and continuing the cycle?

So I tried what turned out to be a more productive reply. Just taking a step back and making it more about the underlying problem. Asking “why” a lot. It probably wouldn’t work with everyone but it deescalated in the short term.

Conclusion

I got some writer’s block trying to wrap this up. Every time I came up with something, I’d think that’s not a solution *crowd boos*.