On my team you'll hear the phrase "What's the why?" at least a few times a week. We say it so often that at one point it became a joke, like "hey remember we're the team that repeatedly asks why we're doing this har har..." but it stopped being funny when we noticed it was making us come up with good answers.
When work needs to be done it's easy to start with a description of the work - the What. You might also include something about implementation - the How. Those are important, but they focus on the individual task, and generally tell you nothing about how the work fits into the big picture.
All of our ticket descriptions have "Why?" as the first section. Our GitHub PR templates are a little more verbose: "What problem does this solve?" which is just a more diplomatic way of asking "Why?" for anyone contributing from outside our team. We have other sections: "What" (or "Details"), "Deliverables", and sometimes "How" for capturing implementation notes. These all come after "Why" though.
So... what's the why?
Why do we put Why front-and-center? When you make the Why a first-class citizen, it helps you focus on the problem rather than the solution. We have big goals and it takes a lot of work to get there. We want to make a difference to the teams we support. We want to make an impact on the business and keep pushing the envelope. We also get a lot of inbound requests. We have to prioritize all this work. If we only know What the work entails, there's no indication of how this work fits into our big picture, we only get that with the Why.
To put a finer point on it, it makes us think about Why is this work important? It makes it much easier to prioritize tasks - when we clearly see the Why, we understand why we're doing this work instead of any of the other work we could be doing. It turns "Why is this work important?" into Why is this the most important work right now?
We have another expression we use every once in a while: What's the why behind the why? If the Why tells us why this work is important to our goals, the why behind the why tells us why the goals themselves are important. It helps us define the bigger picture that the smaller Whys fit into.
There's another reason to keep asking why: you want to know if the answer changes. If priorities shift or the larger goals change, you can use the Why to quickly adjust and continue to deliver the most value.
So keep asking why, and keep making sure you like the answer.
