Are Your Lights On? How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is

A short, funny book that is mostly a sequence of anecdotes making a single argument: most problems people try to solve are not the problems they actually have, and the work of defining the problem is usually harder and more important than the work of solving it. The authors — Weinberg in particular — write with the light touch of experienced consultants, and the book reads as a collection of cautionary tales disguised as riddles. For product direction it is essential training in the first skill of the job: noticing when a team is about to spend six weeks solving the wrong problem. Short, re-readable, and one of the few books in this library you can finish in an afternoon and return to for years.