I am a great advocate of lean startup and while practicing this I received a clear understanding of problem and solution space of a product. Eventually, most of the Product team and PMs knowingly or unknowingly spend so much of time in solution space compared to problem discovery and framing. While interacting several PM every month during the engagement activity which is part of my work, I often amused to hear that many of them understand spending more time in problem space is just a wastage of time. It is the pride and engaging to ideate more and see how assumptions are being solved by the team without running experiments or validation.
Really??? On the other hand, the biggest problem any startups or enterprise face now is to be unclear for its product-market fit and JTBD of the customers and the preponderant reason is that they don’t spend time in the problem space but more into the ideating and solutions. Hence, most of the newbie startups and the enterprise product fail at the early stages.
I like this quotation a lot as it showcases why PM should spend more time in the problem space-
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions” ~by Albert Einstein
This approach truly advocates why the PM should stay in problem space as there is an abundance of good tech professionals around like architects and developers who can solve a problem in N number of ways. The issue is that what problem should be solved and what is the intent to solve a problem is the bigger challenge.
There is certain discipline requires to practice by PM and Product team to inculcate the habit to focus on problem discovery.
- A product manager must have a vision that how each Persona interacts with his product. Understanding this fact, a PM can easily able to understand the positive-negative experiences of this persona journey through its customer journey map.
- Another best practice is to see a problem from a different perspective and make an opportunity solution tree, a popular framework of discovery problems by Teresa Torres, which I like to call “ problem and solution free” as the opportunity is nothing but an outcome of a problem when it is solved.
User Kano or any problem prioritization framework to see the value, weightage and impact of the problems in problem hierarchy. Such a tree can be a better way to foresee all the problems which a product team can solve or firstly run as an experiment.
- Last but not the least, keeping oneself in 5 W mode is the best way to understand the problem and the value. “How” part should come at a much later stage and should be taken care both by engineering lead and Design team with the less intervention of a PM.
The “how” part is not important for the user stories compared to “What” and “Why”. This is a very common mistake by many PMs as they spend too much time in How and very little in What and Why.
Additionally, it is important to frame the problem. A PM should ensure that development team, leadership, stakeholders, business understand what problem he is trying to solve and what business outcomes an org will achieve from this or whether it that is aligned with the vision of the product.
It is important to remember Defining a good problem is an art and a critical thinking aspect. The below framework is not that simple as it looks.
“How might we solve a business/customer problem/pain points/need so that it gives certain business outcomes.”
Hence, for building a user-centric product to keep looking for the problem space without jumping to the solution and frame the problem to align with business outcomes. The Keywords pain points and business outcomes is a clear picture of the organization goals/OKRs and objective.
The framework which is used massively for the problem framing and discovery are –
- problem solution tree mapping (Teresa Torres opportunity solution tree).
- User Interview, Ethnography, A/B testing
- Focused group analysis of Customer journey of a different person who interacts with the product.
- Monthly problem discovery exercise with team based on CRM support logs, market trends, complaint trends etc.
Certain rituals can be followed to ensure teams keep discovering the right problem to solve
- Make an org wise change to conduct Design thinking session quarterly to ideate and test prototypes with stakeholders and users to validate if a problem is worth to solve.
- A user story is too considered as problem space item, hence in enterprise org, PM must drive user story mapping session at least quarterly with stakeholders, business with his team. This activity provides clear visibility across the team regarding the underlying problems/task/goals of the product and criticality to achieve the outcomes by solving them.
- Allocated at least 40 per cent time quarterly to stay in problem defining mode and rest is the success.