A Solution Looking for a Problem is a Problem without a Solution
Your boss sends you a link to some software suite built by somebody he met at a conference and wants to know how it’d be useful for the business.
You know right away the software suite doesn’t do anything remotely relevant to your business. In fact, the degree of irrelevance is so extreme that you don’t even know how to respond. This has literally nothing to do with anything that your company does.
You might want to make your boss happy, so you could stretch your imagination to its very limits, and figure out a complex hacky glue layer that force-fits it into your business model, and just hope to your own personal god that the deal miraculously dies on the table.
If the project moves forward, you know that it’s going to be a difficult and bug-riddled integration process, and the end-product is going to be slower, less-functional, and higher cost than something you’d build yourself, or worse yet, something you’ve already built, a problem you’ve already solved.
Business weenies have the mistaken belief that tool specialization means better tools. The reasoning goes that if a company has a team of full-time engineers focusing on nothing but a specific tool, then it must be a lot better than the tool you’d build in-house with a much more skeletal team.
But the problem with that logic is that the vast majority of engineering and product design time is spent building a product that satisfies a broad range of specific applications across a broad range of types of teams, rather than a specialized single-purpose application for a specific team.
In the end, you find yourself with a tool that only almost satisfies your business use-case, with a newly-introduced world of complexity from third-party integration. It requires you to force your own business model into a tool built by a total stranger.
Sometimes that’s the best move, but when you are starting from the tool and trying to find a place for it in your business, you are almost guaranteed failure.
This is the same thing that happens every few months when a new tech trend takes hold and everybody feels they absolutely can’t live without it in their business. It’s adding Facebook connect to camera manuals. It’s building an app for your restaurant. It’s creating the world’s first blockchain-based toaster. It’s leveraging the power of machine learning to do basic statistics, badly.
Just because some tool delivers value to others doesn’t mean it will deliver value to you. And if you try to force it into your organization without knowing it’ll deliver that value, then you’re just a sucker for sales, the perfect mark.
It’s much better to look at your problems and then find the tools that solve them, rather than to start with a tool and find a problem it fits.
When you start by looking at your problems, you identify the gaps between what you have and what you want to accomplish, and you find the tools that close that gap. When you work from the other direction, you just create fascinating new gaps that didn’t exist in the first place. Congratulations.
