The highest-performing developers I worked with at Amazon asked better questions than everyone else.

After 18 years in tech, here's what I learned: while average engineers jump to solutions, exceptional ones pause to ask the right questions first.

The 6 questions that separated high performers:

• "What problem are we actually solving?"

• "What happens when this fails?"

• "How will we know if this is working?"

• "What's the simplest solution that could work?"

• "Who else has solved this?"

• "What are we NOT going to do?"

The career-changing insight: The quality of your questions determines the quality of your solutions.

These thinking patterns apply beyond engineering to any complex problem-solving role.

What's your go-to question when starting new projects?