Ask an architect to solve a problem, and the first thing they’ll do is question the boundaries of the problem.

Not because architects are contrarian. Because the training is spatial. Before you design anything, you have to understand the site — the constraints, the context, the forces acting on the space from outside. The building doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in relationship.

Most problem-solving traditions treat the problem as given. The architect’s instinct is to treat the problem as a design artifact. Who drew these boundaries? Why here and not there? What are we optimizing for, and is that the right thing to optimize for?

This is why architects make strange collaborators in other fields. They slow things down. They ask inconvenient questions before the team has even agreed on what they’re building. But it’s also why they sometimes see things that domain experts miss.

In architecture school, you learn to hold the whole and the part simultaneously. You’re always aware of the building’s relationship to the street, to the neighborhood, to the city — even when you’re drawing a doorknob detail. That multi-scale awareness is a discipline. It doesn’t come naturally. You have to train yourself to zoom in and out without losing either level.

I’ve found this habit transfers. When I’m thinking about a product, I’m thinking about the user, the team, the market, and the culture simultaneously. When I’m thinking about a strategy, I’m thinking about the immediate move and the ten-year position at the same time. Most people are good at one scale or the other. Architects are trained to work both.

The other thing architecture trains is tolerance for incompleteness. A building takes years. The design is never fully resolved — it evolves through construction, through budget changes, through client conversations. You learn to make decisions under uncertainty, commit to them, and remain open to revision. That’s not a contradiction. It’s the job.

I don’t think of myself primarily as an architect anymore. But I think architecturally. That’s the part that stuck.