Start with The Right Problem
Every day we face problems in our life. Some problems are small and simple — some are not. I remember a glimpse of my past, when my lecturer said,
“What differs art with design is function, and what makes something functional? that thing should answer a problem.”
Everyone is wired differently, but naturally humans are created to be problem solvers; because problems are everywhere around our life. To understand how many problems are in our daily life, let’s take this simple illustration.
“It’s almost noon and John is hungry, he would like to eat something delicious yet healthy. Unfortunately, John needs to get things done in the office before noon. So John orders his lunch using UberEats, and has his lunch at his office desk.” (Sometimes it happens in our daily activities too, right?)
What happen is:
- John’s Need: “Hungry”
- John’s Problem: “A lot of work needs to be done, doesn’t have time to dine in.”
- John’s Goal: “Having a healthy and delicious lunch, but still get work done”
- John’s Option: “Order online food delivery like UberEats”
From John’s perspective, what UberEats does is give him an option to fulfil his needs that also gives him convenience that is able to solve his problem at the same time. From the UberEats’ perspective, what they do is fill the gap between buyers and sellers. Solving the pain point from each side to make it work. In this case UberEat becomes the easy way to get the loved food delivered.
In this simple illustration, it proves why we need to start from the right problem. If UberEat start with only solving people’s hunger, then UberEats will be a restaurant or retail food chain.
There are lots of problems to solve, but there is a lot more to discover. How can we understand our users / customers’ matters? When we would like to build a product, service, or feature we need to start from the right problem statement and not the otherwise. Don’t fall in the build product trap (it’s hard to avoid this trap, I sometimes make these mistakes. Fortunately, there is a good book to read about this thing: https://melissaperri.com/blog/2014/08/05/the-build-trap)
“We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.”
— Russell L. Ackoff
By solving the right user’s problem with good quality and services it creates some sort of the ripple of the best marketing ever known: word of mouth.
So how are we able to frame the right problem statement?
From all the mistakes I have made so far, I conclude that this simple framework works to get what the user needs. The detailed implementation may be varied.
- Pause & Think, we all tend to go with our first idea, and the first ideas are not always the right thing to do. Therefore, every time the idea pops out in our mind, just write it in our notebook. Pause, step back, and think more rather than going with our first idea.
- Collect Information & Dig Facts, collect more information on the users / customers. Dig more facts rather than guessing, and never ask such a direct question like “What’s your problem / What’s your need?” , instead ask something that makes you understand why they did what they did and how they think and respond.
- Small Test & Fast Iterate, testing is always meant to be small and fast. When things are going to be big it tends to slow down. The key here is the faster we iterate the faster we can conclude the right problems.
