i find a lot of the creativity/puzzle solving is in figuring out what they (product + customers) actually want to accomplish and how that models abstractly into computing terms. Once you realize what is being modeled you can often creatively see how given multiple future features are all just a different class of X and can be treated identically/similarly save for a couple of tokens or a slightly different finishing touch

and example might be a permissions feature that could be designed as adding a column to each row, or could be more generalized into a foreign table giving the ability to N:N, or create arbitrary new permissions etc.