No Pattern Matching Without Experience

Once you've mastered a skill or domain everything becomes a pattern. When a new challenge arises you often find yourself thinking: "haven't I seen this before?". Zooming out even further allows you to discern the cycles and the "repackaging" of things we figured out before. This becomes even more interesting when your knowledge starts to broaden across multiple areas of expertise. At the right level of abstraction you will find universal, yet practical mental models that are applicable to just about every part of a business.

There is no shortcut though. Not within a discipline and most certainly not across disciplines. I've not been an individual contributor for the better part of a decade now, but I'm still able to effectively help team members when facing tough, technical problems. Not because of sheer intellect, but simply because I've put in the time. My practical skills are rusty at best, but I recognize patterns based on issues I've seen before and remember how I've solved them. Instead of fully comprehending the problem space a quick "rule of thumb" yields a satisfactory solution.

You have to be mindful of a common pitfall: you can only fully rely on your expertise once you've reached mastery. Without a close enough match you're bound to make the wrong assumptions and arrive at a wrong decision. Until then you need to dissect and deduce the problem, while methodologically working towards a solution. Be cognizant of your abilities and pick your problem solving strategy accordingly.