It’s wild how easily we tend to overcomplicate things as PMs.

Everyone does it. I’ve done it far more often than I’m happy about.

And sometimes it’s warranted: “keeping it simple” doesn’t magically remove the years and years of technical debt or real-world complexity or whatever else keeps your solving of your customer’s problem feeling overly complicated.

So how do you balance that with finding simple solutions to problems?

Honestly, the most useful thing for me has been a tiny little piece of advice that became a company value at a previous startup of mine:

Give it 5 minutes.

Just take 5 minutes to think about something. Not much more, but definitely no less.

Sometimes you just need 5 minutes to sit with a problem, accept its complexity, but find the one or two little areas where you can simplify either your framing of the problem or what you have to work with for a solution.

The more you start to do this, the more you start to see options everywhere. Some of which are still complicated, sure – but maybe less so than you thought. Or even a few that are pretty easy and could make a big impact.