What problem are we solving?
In business, there’s no shortage of customer needs, customer problems to tackle.
Startups may have it easier, they focus on a single problem; whereas bigger organisations may have a multitude of problems they could choose from.
Picking the right one can be difficult; but can bring focus about what your going for.
We can choose a problem space using problem framing.
Problem framing is one of the steps of the design thinking process and involves defining or describing a challenge or issue at hand in a clear, concise, and actionable way.
Problem framing is particularly when you want to:
- Get clarity and focus on ill-defined issues.
- Address the problem from different perspectives
- You want to break away from conventional thinking
- Your team needs a clear, shared understanding of the challenge or problem.
- You want to ensure you’re solving the right problem, not just addressing symptoms
So here are five ways you might be able to use problem framing techniques to set the stage, and to help pick what problem to solve:
- Use the 5 why’s technique. Ask why 5 times to dig deeper. It uncovers issues that may not be 100% immediately apparent.
- Reframe the problem from different perspectives. Draw a 2×2 matrix, put the problem in the middle and put different items in each box such as customer, employee, society, technology, processes, etc. Once you have your 4 items, you can now ask what a customer problem is, what a technology problem is, etc. Example: “Customers aren’t finding enough value in our product compared to alternatives.”
- Use a ship retrospective. One technique from agile is the ship retrospective and you put the problem in the middle and consider the issue from the perspective of anchors, icebergs, wind and sun.
- Create a jobs to be done. A list of customer jobs may identify different problems framed by what the customer is wanting to complete.
- Write a “how might we” structured statement that follows a pattern of “How might we… [action] for [user] in order to [outcome]?” This template helps focus on the user, the desired action, and the intended impact.
By framing the problem, you can:
- Focus efforts on clearly defined problem
- Generate more relevant and innovative solutions
- Align team members and, where possible, stakeholders
- Avoid solving the wrong problem
- Set success criteria for potential solutions