Introduction to The Problem Canvas
“ … winners understand why customers buy. The losers never do…” Steve Blank, The Startup Owner’s Manual (p. 124)
TLDR: The Problem Canvas takes a psychological approach to “deconstruct” a problem worth solving. We are trying to bring objective measurement and science to a discipline which thus far, needs experience and art to work well. If you have opinions on this, do connect with us here.
“Understand your customers” is an adage that has no parallel. As Makers we get this. But there’s a problem…. its subjective. How do you KNOW you “understand” the customer and her problem?
Fortunately, in behavioural sciences, the aspect of understanding people is deeply studied. We have the likes of academics like Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Laureate) whose work has been ground breaking, and practical thinkers like Nir Eyal who has shown us the Hooked way.
Here we have tried to collect all the theory and put them together in a set of highly actionable tools, which will help you visualise, validate and finally quantify your understanding of your customers and their problems is.
Here’s our thesis.
What’s The “Problem”
A problem is a multi-dimensional object.
It needs to be defined with the right “attributes”. Without the attributes, its a statement of fact, and not a problem. For example, you may have heard that Dropbox famously solved the problem : “People forget their pen drives”.
No it didn’t !
Dropbox ACTUALLY solved this problem — “people want to SHARE files and are DEPENDENT on their pen drives”.
When you look at a problem this clearly, a product seems hidden right there. This
Let’s deconstruct this word: “Problem”.
- It should have an “action” — sharing files
- It should have a sucky current solution — need pen drive to share them
- It should be valuable — if I forget my drive, I can NOT share the file.
- And there’s more …. read on.
Remembering all of this, in an interview (when the customer wants to have that coffee and leave), is really really hard. And most of us get it wrong somehow.
The reason probably is the way we are thinking about this. We have made it extremely “artsy” and not scientific. Definition of “problem”, unfortunately, is subject to multiple interpretations. It doesn’t stop there. There are many tools (eg life in a day of the customer) that help us visualise the problem. But since they tend to be unstructured, everyone treats them with their own convenience. The result is an oft used word which means many different things to many different people.
The Problem Canvas
The Problem Canvas allows you to identify the customer, the problematic action, the improvement areas, the reasons for customer to switch and the risks of not switching, all in a single view.
The Canvas is made up of three sections. You can see them on the top, in white font.
In simple words, its a problem when you can put it like this — “ <customer> does <the action> but cannot (or finds it hard) because of <current friction>”.
- The Customer,
- The Action, and
- The Psychographics of Customer-Actions.
Each of these sections is broken down further into sub-sections, as is clear from the above image. Each sub-section has its own characteristics, and series of Customer Interview questions that can be used to validate your hypothesis. We will get to the details of each section in this blog, but will not be able to cover the Customer Interview questions, yet.
Parts of the Canvas are still evolving and you can keep in touch here. All the work we are doing, is going into an e-book that we will try to make available soon. Of course, the shape of it depends upon our assumptions being validated or invalidated. You can give us ONE MINUTE ADVICE to help us move faster.
The Problem Canvas: Customer Section
The Customer section tries to put the customer into full perspective. A customer is someone who has a problem, some awareness of the problem and a common set of behavioural traits. Additionally, despite knowing about the solution you are creating, there is going to be some friction for this customer to adopt your solution. You need to know what this friction is likely to be.
1) Customer (early adopters only)
To define the customer, think of a specific persona, or a few personae. You will soon be surprised how wrong we ALWAYS are about this one. Its important to put a qualifier in the persona definition. I would NOT say that the Dropbox early adopter is a young person who works in tech. Rather, I would say that the Dropbox early adopter is a [person working in tech] with [more than 5 files to share in a week]. The first square bracket contains the demographic — [person working in tech] and the second one contains a qualifier [shares more than 5 files a week to non-team members]. The qualifier helps us think through more deeply about the target audience.
Eg for Makelytics: [Early stage entrepreneur] who is [just deciding on a concept to build on], [MVP stage entrepreneur] who is [struggling to find PMF], [Growth Hacker] who is [thinking of the right messaging].
2) Inertia
Here’s a situation. You have created a product, that truly solves a problem for the user base. You know that at least a few 100 of your target users know that your solution exists. But they don’t use your product.
The reason is a bit nuanced and not so simple. Think of the process of adopting a new product as a phase change. We will borrow from Thermodynamics for a moment and say this
For any phase change to take place, the subject needs to overcome an activation energy.
Activation energy is the sum total of all the reasons users may have to stick to the current solution. Once you overcome all the reasons, you will get the users to take the intended action using your product.
As Makers, we need to check all the reasons that can cause the early adopter to ignore our solution. Usually one (or many) of the following:
- Existing Habits: The Early Adopter might be too used to the old way. They may have filled the old solution with data that makes it easy for them to make it work. Existing habits are biggest blockers because Early Adopters, by definition, are people who have found workarounds. This is a “Psychological Cost” and can be beaten only by “Psychological Reward”.
- Other influencers: The Action you are improving is collaborative, and their collaborators might want to continue the old way.
- Migration Costs: The cost of migrating from their existing behaviour is “expensive” to the user. The cost could be in the form of Time (they will have to learn something new) or Money (they will have to re-invest)
- Social deviance (outside the norm): What you are offering is not a common way to do things at all. The act of using your product makes them seem outside of the norm. This can actually be used to your advantage.
3) Problem Awareness
Awareness of the problem is important because this helps you define the part of their psyche that you need to appeal to. Greater the awareness, more the “logical” approach to picking a solution. Lesser the awareness, more the “emotional” approach to picking a solution. For latent needs, users adopt something new only when multiple factors favour the solution — easy to use, entertaining, social effects etc.
Try to identify the degree of their awareness of the existence of the problem.
Do they think they have:
1. No problem
2. Problem, but manageable
3. Problem, some help appreciated
4. Major problem, help seeked
5. They’re dying, workaround built
Once you identify the user base that checks out options 4 or 5 above, you can start to validate whether you are right about them being early adopters. The Lean Approach recommends you build a solution only for the user base that check out point 5. However, finding a common pattern of user types who have “built” a workaround, and reaching them repeatedly is usually impractical.
To get this straightened out, you need to be clear what you define as a workaround. Does it need to be a tool? Does a process suffice? Does a process that is invoked irregularly also suffice?
The more latent the problem is, the harder it becomes to define a workaround. The more clear a problem is, the more likely you are to create a product in a category that will soon be commoditised, and would no longer be a startup game. It is a rare case when you identify a problem that is clear, people have been finding their own ways of solving it, and yet it has been in the blind spot of most entrepreneurs capable of building it. If you chance upon something like this, you really really need to validate if people’s “own” ways of doing it are actually good enough and the problem does not really exist. This is a comparison with the current solutions and quantifying their “suckiness”. This will be covered in the next section.
The Maker Poll helps you quantify each hypothesis. Fill this one out while you are going through it :-).
Action Sections
1) The Action
What “Customer Action” are you trying to improve? Instead of thinking of the problem, think of the process or action. This action is taken by the target customer base to achieve the desired outcome. No matter how ground-breaking your product is, there HAS to be some action that people already do, that you are going to improve.
Let’s take the infamous Ford quote (Ford never actually said this): “if I asked the users they would want faster horses.” Nevertheless, the action Ford improved was “daily commutation of people and goods”.
Thinking about the action helps in two ways. First, you distance yourself from the problem. This makes it easy to handle multiple Cognitive Biases, which are makers’ worst enemies. And second, when you think of actions you need to be specific. This helps you define things in less subjective and hazy terms.When you say “We solve the problem <X>” it’s very likely that you are being too biased and actually not making much sense. For example “Dropbox solved the problem that people forget pen drives”. On the other hand, when you talk about action, you end up getting into specifics. The action that Dropbox improved is: “sharing of files”. “Pen drives” was just one of the solutions to it, which wasn’t enough.
While this seems to be a subtle difference, it does change the way you think about things. Let us, for a moment, take a look at some of the actions improved by groundbreaking technologies, that were rejected by experts.
2) Intended outcome of the action
Why do the users take this action in the first place? What is it they are trying to achieve or avoid?
The intended outcome helps you associate a “worth” with the action. The greater the worth, the leaner the MVP you can get away with. What we mean is this — all things being the same, users are more likely to try out even a buggy solution when the action that means a lot to them. This is to be contrasted with the situation that the action is not super relevant, in which case even a polished solution might not get adopted.
Try to answer this — what happens if they do NOT take this action at all, and no solutions in this space exist, even the work arounds? If even your early adopters can live without solving it, you are likely trying to create a new market — you need to be aware of this.
Eg. for Makelytics, I would say “ in the absence of quantifiable customer discovery, they WILL build a misshapen product, and will eventually get into a Feature Creep AND Discounting game which will kill them”
3) Cost of the action today
Problems arise out of current solutions. The way people take The Action today, is obviously sucky according to you. In this section, we define what’s wrong with this. Usually, there is a problem in one or more of the following dimensions
1. Time taken:
2. Cash spent:
3. Satisfaction with desired result:
4. Brain cycles (too confusing)
Putting numbers to it is important. The Maker Poll will take you to quantification anyway, but it’s better to be clear upfront. The cost of the action, multiplied by the value of the Intended Outcome gives you a sense of something important — how likely are the customers willing to pay — with money or attention.
Psychographics Section
1) Internal Triggers to take the action
Think of what they are doing just before they take the action. Read Hooked to dig deep. We have borrowed this section from the great Nir Eyal’s hooked principles. We have added some layers to it for so that it’s easy for you to keep an objective view (remember, our goal is to make this more scientific and process driven — objective measurement is paramount).
Positive Trigger: is there a moment of happiness when they take the “action”?
Eg: “eureka moment: they just found some evidence that their product is a good fit for a market they hadn’t intended it for”. How “happy” is this on the Likert 5-point scale?
Negative Trigger: is there a moment of pain when they take the “action”?
Eg. dejection: they just pitched their idea to a collaborator who felt that no one needs it, and the makers had no real data to prove otherwise. How painful is this on the Likert 5-point scale?
2) Best time to place an external trigger (CTA)
This is connected to the “internal triggers” above. Think of the time when they need your product the most.
Eg. Right after they had a meeting with an investor or a partner, they have lots of new thoughts that need validation.
This also helps you plan your communication architecture — when should you send a notification? Should you integrate your product with a calendar, so that you know when to send reminders?
Conclusions
Our goals here are simple —
- We want to dig deeper into the Problem Identification piece of CustDev
- We want to be scientific by measuring everything on a scale
- We do NOT want to replace the Face to Face interview, but augment it.
The process we recommend is this — first you conduct some secondary research to SCOPE the problem. Second, create your problem hypothesis with the Problem Canvas. Third, share a Maker Poll to validate the hypothesis to 30 respondents. Also ask them to OPT-IN for face to face interviews in the Poll itself. Fourth, conduct really deep customer interviews to get to the root of the problem.
PS: Connect with us here.
