Love problems, not solutions: that one thing that makes my job “feels easy”
With first principles you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.
– Elon Musk
I just spent an hour of 1:1 session with one of my Product Managers, Rezha Kusuma who’s handling Shipper Experience product in Kargo. It was scheduled for a 30-minute convo, but time passed by as we discussed many topics around the spot rate shipper product that Rezha is leading.
He came to me with problems around moving user from WhatsApp to our Shipper App. For context, these are the shipments that we are still building stronger confidence to fulfil e.g. lead time < 3 hours, unpopular routes, etc. We want to make sure for these shipments we are experimenting first with WhatsApp fulfilment before asking them to get matched via app.
Love problems, not solutions…
As I reflect to the 1:1, it’s interesting that throughout our discussion I realize that we barely talked about solution. We brainstorm a lot of whys, hypothesis, assumptions, and pretty much the unknowns that we need to validate. I even challenged him to rethink about the “How Might We” question (re: How Might We is a design thinking technique we are using to frame a design challenge).
So instead of asking “How might we move SME shippers from Whatsapp to Shipper App?”, we concluded that we still needed to strengthen our value proposition statement. Hence, after an hour of brainstorming we reframed the question into “How might we create a truck ordering experience for shipper that’s much better that the current traditional method?”.
We do have most of the hypothesis listed, but we still need to validate them one more time. So we decided that Rezha will work with our product design team to drive the value proposition canvas research this week. He will find out more about jobs-to-be-done, pains and gains analysis, and value-propositions mini conjoint analysis to attribute which feature / solution gets valued the most.
The call ended with more problems instead of solutions, but it still felt good
We closed the 1:1 with clarity: not on the solutions or features to be built yet ; but on the problems we want to investigate further. But we both felt good. At least I hope Rezha felt good because he got “empowered” to solve this problem as opposed to receiving a blank command on “these are the features you must build this quarter…”
Kargo’s first principle culture: an evolution
There was one point over the call that I even challenged Rezha on the extreme, “What if it turns out WhatsApp is the more desirable way to order trucks? As the PM, would you deprioritize your app and work on the WhatsApp chatbots instead?”.
A typical PM who’s obsessed with his “solution” might easily feel offended if someone is challenging their feature or app. But I am glad that in Kargo as we evangelized the first-principles thinker as part of our company culture, this is embedded in us hiring folks who exemplify strong problem solving acumens.
As Rezha started thinking thoroughly on this question, I reflect back on my last two years in Kargo and how we have evolved our own interpretation on this culture. At first, business team approached product team with feature request or recommendation. It’s already in solution format.
But we took the time to communicate and educate the team about ways of working with product team. I conducted workshops on what does it mean to build product roadmap, and we empowered our PMs to work with Objectives and Key Results which has been adopted throughout the organization.
Over the time, the business teams started seeing product teams as partner to solve some of the business problems together. We talked about problem more and more, and our Product Designers spend a lot of time working with them to co-author solutions and test them especially for internal products. This shift has been one of the greatest highlight of my career.
Being able to witness how obsession to user and business problems has greatly impacted the team morale and boosted overall engagement. So it’s very fulfilling to see how the team interaction has evolved until today. This can only happen thanks to our business leaders open-mindedness to try out many different things, included blocking their schedule to attend our Design Sprints so kudos to all of them!
The way forward: solving the problems better
We are still long way to go in solving all of our users’ problems and in building Indonesia’s biggest logistics operating system. But one thing I’m super confident is that we have people like Rezha and we have a strong culture in place to empower our team to solve user problems in ways that benefits our business.
We are still learning and iterating ourselves, so would love to hear some feedback from fellow product folks who are following this topic and have inputs on how we can make it better!
About the author
Rangga Husnaprawira is Head of Product at Kargo Technologies, leading the product management and product design functions for the organization in the mission of building Indonesia’s biggest and most trusted logistics operating system.
Further readings on anchoring product management work with problem-first mindset:
