What problem are we trying to solve?

As a product manager, one of my responsibilities is to make sure we’ve correctly defined the problem we’re trying to solve.  And then, I need to communicate it loudly and often.   I can tell when I’m struggling or when I’ve failed to do this:  I get a lot of blank or angry stares from other people.  I feel confused when asked the next obvious question and I don’t have an answer.   Or when I can’t defend the decision that’s been made.

I’ve felt the pain of this quite recently when I and other leaders in the company failed to do this.  It cost us nearly 10 days and burned lots of goodwill, respect and patience.  We thrashed around saying to each other the same thing:  ”Why are we doing this?  This is ridiculous.” And then getting to work at doing the ridiculous thing we didn’t understand.  When we stepped back and defined the problem, the answer became obvious and all of a sudden, everyone was in the ‘let’s do this’ or ‘we can make it happen this way’ and the team became a team again and we mapped out a solution and a game plan in a few hours.

I’m sharing this not because I want sympathy for feeling like a dolt (although I do), but because it is so easy to short-change this step in the constantly evolving, face-paced-get-this-to-market now world.  The pressure to deliver solutions quickly; to be working on something, anything, is immense.   An important customer needs something right now.  The market has shifted and we need to catch up, right now.   The competition has put out a new version and we think it’s going to take our lunch money.  

As we shrink staffs and continue to ‘do more with less’, the strategy and planning role for Product Managers is often sacrificed to the ‘Holy Scrum, Batman, there’ another Sprint tomorrow’ reality of our jobs.  Unfortunately, this means we often take short cuts and sometimes there is little patience for the ‘hold on we need to figure this out’ plea from product management.

My recent experience though, reminds me of how utterly ridiculous it is when we miss the basics of product management and frankly, all problem solving tasks:  Take as long as it takes to define and understand what problem are we trying to solve.  You’ll actually save time and money and deliver a product to market.

Here’s my “Do I know what problem I’m trying to solve” check list:

1.   Can I state:  The ideal, the reality and the consequences of succeeding or failing.    Do I stay on message every time I explain it or am I struggling to be consistent in my communication.

Example:  Repeat business is the most profitable for us.  20% of our customers buy our products, don’t fully implement them.  We lose ongoing maintenance, support, service and upgrade revenue and cannot expand our presence in their organization with other product lines.  Increasing adoption during the implementation phase will provide our customers with a better solution.  We’ll reduce our acquisition costs and increase our market share, improving the products overall profit contribution to the company.  

2.  Do I feel stupid saying it?

This is really a gut check, but we’ve all been there.  We know we’ve haven’t nailed it.  We see the ‘rolling of the eyes’, the heads go down on the table, the arms folded.   We feel stupid saying it and don’t exactly know why.

3.  Do we keep coming back to the same questions?  If it’s not just hard (because some problems are hard to solve), but frustrating, exhausting and ineffective.  

When we keep running into dead-ends or when every conversation raises the same questions about why we’re doing this step back and reexamine the stated goal and the stated problem.  If they make sense, push on.  If not, revisit.

Even when we have the right statement and have communicated it clearly, reaching that goal will be hard and we will sometimes lose our way.  If restating the goal gets us back on track or helps focus us on the problem, we’re that’s great.  If not, go back to refining the problem statement.

Getting the right problem defined is a breakthrough, ah ha moment.