Take the Note, Not the Solution: A UX Lightbulb from Amy Poehler’s New Podcast

If you know me, you know Parks and Recreation is my forever comfort show. I’ve rewatched it more times than I can count. Leslie Knope is everything—wildly capable, full of heart, and somehow able to make chaos feel cozy.

So when I found out Amy Poehler launched a new podcast—Good Hang—and the one of the first episodes was a conversation with Rashida Jones? Headphones. On. Immediately.

About halfway through, Rashida shared something Bill Hader once told her when she was stepping into a writing role for the first time:

Take the note, not the solution.

Meaning: when someone gives you feedback, don’t just take their fix at face value. Step back. Figure out what’s actually not working for them. The problem is probably real—but the proposed solution might not be the right one.

And it stopped me cold—mid-scroll, mid-sip, whatever I was doing.
Because this is UX. This is exactly what we do.
But I’d never had the language for it until that moment.

In UX, we rarely get neat, well-phrased notes.
We get feature requests. Frustrated emails. Offhanded complaints during interviews. It’s easy to fall into checklist mode—turning every request into a to-do item. But the real work? It’s in the patterns. The nuance. The thing behind the thing.

Last year, I was supporting a product team that kept hearing the same feedback:
“I wish I could just edit this view.”

So the team started brainstorming solutions—inline fields, real-time updates, editable components. But something about it didn’t sit right with me.

As I watched user sessions and listened closely, a different pattern started to emerge:
They weren’t trying to edit.
They were trying to scan.

They wanted to understand what was in front of them. Quickly. Confidently.
They were seeking clarity—not control.

I was the only one on the product team who said,
“I don’t think this is an editing issue. I think it’s a scannability issue.”

And right away, something clicked.

Our product lead pulled up user interaction data he’d been puzzling over for weeks—data I hadn’t even seen yet. And it backed the pattern exactly: users weren’t engaging with edit actions. They were hovering, scrolling, jumping between sections—visibly searching for something. Trying to verify, not change.

So we didn’t redesign for editing.
We redesigned for readability, visual hierarchy, and faster information retrieval.
And just like that? The “editing” requests stopped.

They never needed more editing.
They needed less friction.

That podcast moment put words to something I’d been feeling for a long time:
The best UX happens when you take the note—but not the solution.
When you listen for what’s behind the request.
When you trust your gut and tune into the pattern, even when no one else sees it yet.

So thank you, Amy.
Thank you, Rashida.
And thank you, Bill Hader, for delivering my new favorite UX principle—via Good Hang and a quiet cup of coffee on a slow morning.

If you want to catch the moment for yourself, here’s a link to the episode that starts you off at 33:15, right when Rashida introduces the advice I mention above.