Stop falling in love with solutions!

“Fall in love with the problem not the solution, and the rest will follow” — Waze co founder, Uri Levine.

Let’s face it ideas are cheap! I probably have on average 10 ideas a week. I write most of them down and every now and again I take a look at my idea list and wonder if I should do one of them. Most of these ideas come from common everyday problems like how do I eat healthily with a busy work and home life — there are just not enough hours in the day to plan, shop and cook healthy meals.

In large businesses ideas are also generally not a problem. More often than not the problem is how do you make sure everyone feels like they have the opportunity to put their ideas forward.

With so many ideas how do you make sure you are working on the right ideas? The answer is to be structured, focus the team on the problem you want to solve and through experimentation work on finding the right solution. Start with a clear mission statement like; “Planning and shopping for your weekly groceries should take no longer than 15 minutes”. This will then be your guiding light and allow you to evaluate different solutions against how well they achieve your mission.

Next the fun begins… The team can rally round and find lots of potential solutions to the problem you are trying to solve. Having lots of ideas at this point, to a single clear problem, is actually a good thing and will avoid you falling in love with any particular solution. As a team you can then prioritise (I will do a separate post on prioritisation soon) which solution to experiment with first and take through a build-measure-learn process to test your key assumptions. It’s best if you start with the mindset that you are very unlikely to find that your first idea will be your Cinderella.

If you are reading this and are feeling guilty of falling in love with a solution then don’t. Passion for an idea is great but prepare to be wrong and always ask yourself ‘is this solution truly addressing the mission?’.