There's a question I’ve been trying to ask more often in product reviews: Is this the best solution?

Most of the time, the answer isn't yes. What I hear instead sounds like: "Given the timeline..." or "We are waiting on X team..." or "We had to cut scope due to Y.” 

But when someone explains why this isn't their best work, they're telling me exactly what was in the way. If the constraint is time, I want to know what a less pressured version would have looked like. If it's a dependency, I want to know how far upstream the blockage actually is. So instead of moving on, I'll follow up with: What would you explore if you had a full uninterrupted day on just this? Or: If that dependency wasn't there, what changes? The answers are usually immediate. The team already knows. They've been sitting on it, but not really expecting anyone to ask.

Adam Morgan and Mark Barden write about "propelling questions" in A Beautiful Constraint. questions that pair a bold ambition with a significant constraint in a way that forces you off the path of predictable answers. "Is this the best solution?" works the same way. The constraint is already present. The question just makes it impossible to ignore.

It's worth noting that sometimes the answer that comes back is: yes, actually, this is the best solution right now. Not because the team settled, but because a faster, scrappier solution advances learning more quickly and makes the case for deeper investment down the road. Or because there are three other things more important right now, and this solution unblocks another team or prevents something worse from happening. The question isn't meant to imply the work is inadequate. It's meant to understand the reasoning  and make sure the tradeoff was a real choice rather than a default.

Most teams I've worked with are split across multiple workstreams with competing priorities and being asked to move fast in areas where moving fast produces mediocre work. Dominica DeGrandis writes about this in Making Work Visible. These competing priorities and unfinished work create hidden costs that organizations rarely stop to measure. The result is that people optimize for what's achievable rather than what's possible. They scope down early. It accumulates quietly, and the work quality follows it down.

The question only works if you act on what you hear. Ask it and then do nothing, and it becomes one of the more demoralizing things a leader can do. Most of the levers that would actually improve the work aren't the team's to pull. The levers live upstream, across org boundaries, or at a different level. Part of my job is figuring out which constraints are just the cost of business, and which ones are moveable.