Fall in love with the problem

In Nuvem Shop / Tienda Nube we have a saying (kudos to Julie Zhuo’s awesome post 😍) that goes

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution

We build a product for thousands of merchants and millions of buyers. We get tons of feedback and it is awesome. Thing is, people don’t usually state problems when giving feedback, they state solutions. “I need you guys to do ____”, “How is it even possible you don’t have ____”, “For the love of GOD, just build ____”. Every time someone is asking you for a feature, what they are really telling you is “I’m having a huge pain with ____ and I really think ____ would be an awesome way to go about it”. If you manage to state the problem to your customers and it resonates with them, you’ve nailed it.

That’s why the first thing we do when we start working on a feature on our Product Team is to have a Kick-off meeting and state:

1. The problem we are solving
2. The metrics we’ll use to see if we solved it

This is solution-agnostic and makes sure everyone is on the same page before we even start talking about possible solutions. Don’t be afraid of spending time here, understanding the problem and choosing the right way to measure success is key to good execution.

It also provides a framework to quickly disregard bad solutions, some of them even before we start working on them.

Cool quote (source), but we still love Tesla

So next time you go about building a feature, take a step back and try to figure out the problem and your success metrics 😉.