I used to talk to people and think my job was to have all the answers to their questions.
Someone would show me a design or a piece of code and I'd immediately see what I would change, what's wrong and what's worth keeping.
If I were you...
I'd start saying.
There's a problem with that approach. I wasn't them.
I didn't have their deadlines. I wasn't in the meetings where the scope changed. I had no idea which technical constraint had already messed up their week. I hadn't heard the difficult conversations they had with customers about what they were showing me.
Only they have because only they were them.
I had to learn the hard way that advice I gave before understanding often sounded clever and achieved very little.
So now I try to start somewhere else.
I ask the designer why they chose that interaction. I ask the engineer what made the accessible option difficult. I ask the product manager what they're trying to protect in this release.
And then I listen. Who knows what they'll reveal!?
This doesn't mean I avoid hard conversations or that I act like a psychiatrist. I still say out loud when something will exclude people. I still challenge their decisions, explain the risk and push for a better outcome. But I try not to pretend I would make better choices in circumstances I haven't taken the time to understand.
Instead of saying, "If I were you, I'd do this," I say, "This is what's worked for me in the past in similar situations, how I'd approach it now and this is why."
This leaves room for my experience without treating it as universal advice and lets me be confident about what I know and honest about what I don't.
That's how I want to work with teams.
I want to understand the decision first and then help improve it.