Ten years ago at Bloomberg, there wasn’t enough space on the engineering floor. So they put me and a colleague downstairs with the journalists.
What struck me was how much they talked. Constant phone calls, face to face discussions, and quite a lot of gossip. Then, towards the end of the day, one hour of silent typing. It was so interesting!
As an engineer, I recognised the research, share, execute. But their tools were different. Where we wrote design docs and got peer reviews, they talked through angles and tested ideas in conversation.
Makes me wonder… what insights live only in conversations and never make it into our docs?
The best learnings often happen outside of your discipline. Pay attention to how other teams think through problems. Their constraints are different, but their reasoning patterns might be exactly what you need.
Physical proximity still matters, even in a remote world. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from simply being in the room where different work happens.