10 insights of the Problem-Solution Fit canvas
My learnings after using the tool for over a year.
Here are 10 simple insights that emerged during my Lean Startup journey and research for the Problem-Solution Fit canvas:
1. If people spend time on something, they care about it. When the problem is not supported by behavior, it’s not a problem worth solving.
2. Small but frequent inconvenience turns into a big pain in your customer’s eyes over time. Frequently wasted time is painful. So, how often does a person experience an annoyance before it becomes preferable to just pay for a solution and be done with it?
3. Complaints without actions and active public discussion mean nothing. When people complain a lot about the subject but there is no behavior to support their claims, no attempt to solve it or educate themselves, then it’s not a problem worth solving.
4. Intensified behavior always indicates a trigger, which could be identified and could occur again. Refer to triggers that are familiar to your customers in your visuals and marketing communication. At an early stage it helps you to catch their attention, let them try your product, and over time shape what your brand should be.
5. Your customers will appreciate you identifying problems that make them freeze in indecision. If the problem is big solutions are costly and people freeze rather than act, or waste their time/money outsourcing the solution. They will therefore appreciate your help to understand the behavioral process and making them feel in control again.
6. Directly and indirectly related behavior suggests to you how a particular problem can be solved, by telling you which experiences and methods are already familiar to your customer. Help people to adopt your product by designing it to fit in with what your customers already know, use, like, respect or have sympathy for. When people consider trying a new product, they won’t appreciate being caught in an uncomfortable situation when they don’t know how to interact with it.
7. If you are in doubt on which problem to focus on, or the problem scope is too broad to solve at once, go for the most frequent annoyance that has intense related behavior (frequently invested time). A frequent problem means frequent interactions with customers, it helps you to build up trust and enables you to then gradually solve problems from the whole scope.
8. Existing customer behavior suggests which channels you should test online and offline, and which channels should you use for customer development.
9. It’s usually the same done differently, or new done in a familiar way. Channels of behavior and mediums change over time, existing methods become outdated.We are therefore constantly looking for different, better ways to do the same things, communicated better. On the other hand, progress pushes people to try new things, but to increase adoption, a product should look approachable, tangible and a bit familiar (when familiar sometimes means just like in Star Wars :))
10. Think in scenarios, from a customer perspective. A trigger raises problem awareness, which in turn causes specific behavior (what do people do about it?), which results in an outcome (how people feel about it and solving it like that?). You should understand what they currently get in comparison to what they could get with your product or service.
I hope that this helps you to get started, you can download and try Problem-Solution fit canvas at www.solutioncanvas.com. If you have any questions, feedback, ideas and thoughts to discuss or know some interesting challenges which we can crack together, send me an email at daria@ideahackers.nl.
XOXO,
Daria Nepriakhina,
Creator of Problem-Solution fit canvas
Edited by amazing Dora Coventry
