Are you a problem solver?

Almost two decades ago, I joined a new team. The team provided services for other teams within the company, ultimately serving our external customers. I was new, so I was still learning who our "customers" were.

One day, the quality assurance (QA) team came to me with problems they found while testing. It turned out the environment they used for testing was not the environment having the right code. Back then, most big companies released software updates every few months, and that's how we did things too.

Here's the problem: We had different versions of our code in different testing environments to support parallel development, but the other teams were never told which environment to use to test which update. Can you imagine the confusion? They were testing the wrong things and finding problems that shouldn't have existed should they have used the right environment!

I was new, but I like solving problems. So, I came up with a plan to rotate our testing environments regularly and clearly communicate which environment went with which update for what release. After that, there were no more mix-ups!

It might seem simple, but it saved everyone a lot of headaches and extra work. You might wonder why no one thought of it before. Well, sometimes all it takes is one person to make a difference.

The key thing here is the mindset. I focused on helping the people who used our service, saving the company money, and getting rid of the confusion and frustration.

What about you? What are some of the seemingly small wins you've had in your career but created big impact? And...what problems are you solving now?