Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis is the discipline of not stopping at the first explanation. You decompose the system, find the failure mode, instrument it, and validate against evidence instead of guessing — the same loop whether the thing that broke is a composite beam or a churn metric.

This is the engineering reflex I lean on most as a product manager. A dashboard tells you something dropped; root cause analysis tells you why, and “why” is the only thing you can actually act on.