From Solutions to Problems

Lessons learned while shifting paradigms at work

Once upon a time a couple of years ago, one of my mentors (and favourite people in the world) repeatedly drilled the idea above into my brain. Her advice for Product people was to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. At the time, I stubbornly went along with it without understanding the importance of this one principle. I had always thought that technology products were the result of great solution skills. I wasn’t wrong, I was just missing the pre-requisite steps—a solution is only as valuable as the problem it solves.

What I didn’t see at the time was what this paradigm really boils down to. It means adopting a founder’s mindset—listening instead of simply hearing, having empathy in the face of challenging situations, and obsessing over the root of a problem. Some of the most noteworthy founders in recent history have attributed their company’s successes to pure customer obsession—labouring over what pains their customers are facing, what those problems mean for their broader business, and what is valuable to them in a solution?

The funny part about this is that outside of these entrepreneurial scenarios, a lot of us in the real world spend way too much time focusing purely on solutions. We’re expected to provide solutions to anything and everything…