If you were to flatten and chart the journey of solving a problem—building something not yet made, figuring out something you don’t yet know how to build—it rarely looks neat. It rarely looks like the tidy, linear roadmap living in Confluence or tucked away in Jira.
It’s more like a maze.
You’re dropped somewhere inside. The walls are high. The hallways stretch in every direction, all identical. You don’t know how big the maze is. You don’t know which way leads forward, which way loops back, or which way slams you into a dead end. All you can see are the walls in front of you, and the sky above.
The only objective: Get. Out.
So you try. You pick a direction. You move.
And if you’re lucky, you learn something. Not certainty—never certainty. But a clue. A shadow of a pattern. Enough to cross out a dead end on the map in your head, enough to push forward into the next unknown hallway.
Wayfinding
That’s how I see a lot of the projects I’m tasked with—the wild, ambitious ones. The ones where nobody’s handed you a map, because the map doesn’t exist yet.
I think that’s why the way I work doesn’t look like typical. Like what a designer or engineer is "supposed to do". I’m not polishing pixels. I’m not grinding Jira tickets. Those are important—but you do them when you already know where you’re going.
Right now... We don’t.
So I scout. I probe. I leap. I’m sketching a map where there isn’t one—scrambling up to a bird’s-eye view of this jagged, angular landscape so the team can point and say: We started here. We’re here now. Next, we’ve got to try here, here, and here.
And that map... It doesn’t look like a map at first. It’s scraps. Spreadsheets of lists upon lists. Scribbled notes on sticky paper. Half-broken prototypes duct-taped together. Loom videos rambling at microscopic breakthroughs. Slack threads a mile long. Comments that look too small to matter. Superficially “silly” questions that crack open a new hallway.
Individually, they don’t look like much. Random markings on the wall.
But collectively, they’re waypoints. They’re breadcrumbs. They’re the trail we leave behind so we don’t get lost—and the proof that we’re making progress, even when the maze wants us to believe we’re stuck.
Individually, trash. Collectively, a trail. A way out. Hopefully.
Trapped
A maze doesn’t give you clarity up front. It gives you confusion. False turns. Endless walls.
That’s the part that feels claustrophobic. You can’t see the whole picture. You can’t see the exit. And that uncertainty can suffocate you—especially for teams used to clean roadmaps and straight lines.
And the hardest part? Not just the dead ends—it’s the morale.
The grind of moving forward only to circle back. Again. And again. The sting of hitting another wall. Another dead end. And underneath it all, the quiet fear that starts to fester... Maybe we’re lost. Maybe there is no way out. Maybe we’ll fail. Maybe we were doomed to fail from the start.
That’s when teams stumble. That’s when people burn out. When the maze wears you down, that’s when you help others rise up.
As a leader. A pathfinder. A maze runner. You don’t just scout the hallways—you hold the morale. You steady the group when the walls start to feel like they’re closing in. You notice who’s falling behind. You reach out a hand. You remind them they’re not walking the maze alone.
It’s just being the calm voice that cuts through the chaos, saying with complete honesty (and a dash of hope):
“Yeah, this sucks right now. But look how far we’ve come—together. No guarantees, no promises of an easy way out. But we’ll figure it out. Together. We will.”
The goal is to get out. The work is making sure the team still believes we can.
Out
Building the thing when you already know what to build? That’s the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to build in the first place. The hard part is getting out of the maze.
On a long, straight road, you can think in miles. You can polish roadmaps that stretch into quarters. In a maze? You think in days. Hours. Steps.
You stay tight. You communicate. Constantly. Every day, sometimes multiple times a day. You hop on calls. You connect in Slack threads. You ask the only questions that matter: Where are you at? Here’s what I know. What do you know? Where do you think we should go?
You check ahead. You double back. You course-correct. You mark the walls. You chart. You map. You move.
That’s how momentum builds. Not through grand plans, but through relentless micro-moves.
And slowly, the maze starts to change. What felt endless begins to reveal patterns. The false turns shrink. The map takes shape. You’re moving—faster, sharper, together.
Then one day, it clicks. You turn a corner and realize the exit isn’t just an idea anymore—it’s right there. The walls open up. Sunlight pours through. The thing you’ve been working toward suddenly exists.
All that time. A mountain of effort. You have a thing! And… it works? It works!
A problem isn’t a roadmap. It’s a maze. You can’t see the whole thing—just walls and dead ends. The scraps—messy notes, half-broken prototypes, “dumb” questions—aren’t noise. They’re the map you’re making as you go. The real job isn’t pretending you know the way; it’s keeping the team moving when the maze wants them to stop. No certainty. No guarantees. Just steps forward—and the leap of faith that together, you’ll find the way out.
Your first maze shatters your faith. It makes you question yourself—am I incompetent? Broken? But the more you push through them, the more muscle you build. You start to recognize the walls. The twists. The traps. The reps. You remember how to move.
It never gets easier. But you do get better.
And when the next maze comes—and it will—you’ll be ready. Or at least, as ready as anyone can be, to find your way through again.