Staff SWE: working across contexts

Really good advice from https://lethain.com/layers-of-context/ that 100% makes sense while working as a staff+ eng.  

As someone who used to struggle greatly with this, I’ve found it valuable to approach problems in three phases:

1. Focus exclusively on understanding the perspective of the other parties
2. Enter the mode of academic evaluation where I try very hard to think about the problem from a purely intellectual basis
3. Only after finishing both those approaches, only do I bring my own feelings into the decision making–what do I actually think is the best approach?