You’re a leader, more specifically, one that works with technology, engineering, or product development—if you’re reading this. You’re faced with hard problems every day. As easy as it is to simply leap headfirst into the tried and true, I’ve learned over the years that one of the most effective mental models is to step back and apply First Principles Thinking.
What Exactly is First Principles Thinking?
First principles thinking is literally just breaking down complicated problems into their basic, underlying facts and rebuilding solutions afresh from scratch. Instead of analogizing solutions from one’s own background (or worse, copying competitors), this process forces you to question assumptions, drill down, and generate true innovation.
Why Does This Matter in Tech?
First, a reality check: tech leaders are perpetually under pressure. Pressure from stakeholders, competitors, or even our own aggressive timetables. Under constant pressure, it’s all too easy to fall back on generic playbooks or industry “best practices.”
Here’s the problem: best practices are average solutions to typical challenges. They will seldom provide breakthrough outcomes.
By taking a step back and applying first principles, you’ll be able to find new solutions. Like when you’re scaling a platform, it’s easy to rush in and just throw more infrastructure or conventional scaling techniques at the problem. But consider this, what’s really the limitation here? Is it compute, is it latency, or maybe it’s a suboptimal data architecture that’s inherently broken?
Practical Application: Scaling Without Blindly Adding Costs
Recently, my team faced frenetic scaling problems after a product launch that led to excessive traffic. GUT reaction: give more AWS resources—everyone knows that’s the easiest thing to do. However, I waited and wore first principles thinking instead:
- Pinpoint the root constraints: We plunged into performance metrics. Was the server load? Database contention? API inefficiencies?
- Challenge every assumption: We had initially presumed that we needed more resources. But was our data structure efficient enough? Were our caching techniques maximized? Were certain features too resource-intensive when they did not have to be?
- Rebuild the solution from fundamentals: We realized that the real problem wasn’t server capacity; it was how often we cached and repeatedly called expensive database queries. By revisiting our caching strategy in its most basic form, we greatly reduced costs and improved performance.
The Five Whys Technique
A helpful technique to help with first principles thinking application is the “Five Whys” technique, notoriously created by Toyota:
- Why is the system slow?
- Because the servers are overloaded.
- Why are the servers overloaded?
- Because there’s too much traffic from repeated database calls.
- Why are there repeated database calls?
- Because the cache refreshes too often.
- Why does the cache refresh often?
- Because it is based on a badly made update interval choice.
- Why was this update interval choice made?
- Due to an old assumption about user behavior.
By repeating “why” several times, we found the root cause and fixed the fundamental issue rather than giving a superficial solution.
First Principles Framework for Practice
Here’s a simple-to-use but effective framework that you can apply to practice first principles thinking:
- Define the problem: Clearly articulate what you’re trying to solve.
- Simplify into elements: Define and break down the problem elements.
- Question assumptions: Boldly challenge each element and assumption.
- Uncover root causes: Use the Five Whys or other methods to drill down to the root causes.
- Rebuild solutions: Build new solutions from these absolute truths.
Beyond Technical Problems
First principles aren’t exclusive to technology. They’re also robust in leadership contexts—hiring, organizational structure, and even communication strategy.
With a consistent drip of employee turnover, rather than showering employees with more benefits or bonuses, you wonder: Why are people actually quitting? Is it compensation, chances for growth, or perhaps lack of meaningful work?
By cutting it down to first principles, you’ll be more likely to find simpler, but better answers.
Quick Tips to Practice First Principles Thinking
- Attack assumptions aggressively: Assume nothing is holy.
- Ask “Why?” repeatedly: Drill deep to an anchor truth.
- Simplify ruthlessly: If it looks too complex, you probably haven’t cut it thinly enough.
First principles thinking won’t always be the simplest or fastest route—at first. But the clarity and imagination it provides are unmatchable. In a rapidly shifting tech world, that clarity isn’t just worth its weight in gold; it’s mandatory.
Remember, average strategies have average results. The next time you find yourself faced with complexity, try applying first principles—it may very well change how you lead.
What’s your experience been with first principles thinking? Have you uncovered some unexpected epiphanies by pushing back against assumptions? Tell us your tale in the comments below ?
