What problem does your product solve?

Do your stakeholders and users agree?

Continuously reinforcing the problem to be solved and the success metrics of a product will help bring clarity and refine expectations for all involved parties.

“If I were given 1 hr to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”

- Albert Einstein

A digital product manager’s role is complex. The role fluidly spans multiple competency areas, macro and micro, strategic and tactical, every day. Along the journey to launch and refine a product in market, one can be easily distracted with the process of building and communicating — while losing site of a very simple question …

What problem are you solving?

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak” — Hans Hoffman.

Eliminate. The. Unnecessary.

The diagram below depicts at least 4 layers a product team engages with continuously in the process of launching a new product from within an organization. Consider all of the potential layers for miscommunication and misunderstanding, thereby leading to confusion, swirl, frustration and disappointment.

No digital product team is an island. Yet, the product team is the most direct delivery path from idea to in-market solution.

Distilling activity down to the problem to be solved, and continually reinforcing this in the context of feature choices, timeline choices, product strategy choices, can help radically simplify conversation and uncover gaps in understanding or misalignment.

Product teams interact in a complex internal environment pre- and post-launch.

Without clarity on the problem to be solved, the product team will invariably find themselves in multiple conversations justifying decisions, choices, funding, support and general alignment. Clarity on the problem to be solved will help empower the team to build the best solutions in alignment with the problem to be solved and the success metrics. It will also empower stakeholders and sponsors to support the same vision the product team is building towards.

How will you know when you’re successful?

Ex: What are the product’s key success metrics?

Once you’ve define the problem — the team must know how to measure success. Metrics can easily be bucketed into one of four main categories:

1. Acquisition
2. Engagement
3. Conversion
4. Retention

Any product should have at least one success metric outlined.

With this success metric, you create a baseline reference point for all future conversations within your team and across the network of influence, responsible for supporting, building on top of or sponsoring the product effort.

With a clear problem to be solved and simple metrics to support, the product manager and product team and all stakeholders and supporting layers have a continual baseline for purpose, mission and approach.

It is hard enough getting a digital product to market in an efficient, predictable, reliable manner with a high-performing team and closely aligned stakeholders. The best approach is to continue beating the simple rhythmic drum of product problem to be solved and success metrics.

This responsibility falls on the product manager. Everyone on the product team has multiple responsibilities.

It is the product manager’s job to define/refine/simplify the problem to be solved + success metrics and continuously align the product network (stakeholders, sponsors, product team) accordingly.

If you are a product manager and you don’t define this for your team, who will?