> Imagine telling workers at a construction company that the hard problem was never building stuff but figuring out what needs to be built.

Isn't this kind of true, though? Housing construction, for instance, isn't bottlenecked by the technical difficulties of building, but by political and regulatory hurdles. Or look at large, capital-intensive projects such as the always-proposed, never built new Hudson river train tubes. Actually building these will take billions of dollars and many years, but even they would be long built by now were it not for their constantly being blocked by political jockeying.

Building stuff _does_ often involve difficult technical challenges, but I still think that as a general aphorism the observation that this isn't the _hardest_ part holds true.