Keeping in context that I've not worked with him in (gulp, 30 years!) at Intel he was one of the folks who put problems into the whole picture. So a customer would say, this chip doesn't work, over at Systems Validation we would get hopefully enough information to re-create their problem on an Intel built board, and Pat's job (at the time) was to co-ordinate between us, design engineering, and marketing to figure out how to tell the customer to proceed.

The "actual" problem could be anything from the customer misinterpreting the datasheet (Marketing/Comms problem), to insufficient testing (Factory/Production problem), to chip function (Design Engineering problem). As a "new college grad", or NCG in the lexicon, I admired how he dug out details from various folks to get to the real problem. He always had ideas for things Systems Validation (SV) could do to maybe trigger the problem that made sense to me. He really embodied the philosophy of fixing the problem not fixing blame on some group.