Ko Lefcho's wroclove.rb 2025 lightning talk. Premise: a lot of the audience is senior, knows how to code, but performant and clean code won't get you promoted beyond senior at most companies. Engineering management is the default next step, which kind of sucks for those who want to stay close to the computer. An alternative path is solving the company's 'haunting problem' — a years-old issue that multiple teams have failed to fix. Example: his company's invoicing bug that forced rerunning invoices three months later, making clients unhappy. The 'best engineers' team assigned to fix it also failed, because it's always a people problem. A PM isn't the right owner either for organizational-not-product problems with severe technical aspects. His process: interview every affected person, find the common theme and the reason prior efforts failed, form a vision, ship the smallest policy iteration restoring someone's faith, iterate. Result: a six-month new-billing-system rewrite rolled out to 70% of customers, bumpy but successful. Recommends The Staff Engineer's Path and the article 'Everything Is Important'.