5 Ways to Treat Work as Problems to Solve
In a competitive market with fast changing customer needs and behaviors, there is pressure to deliver results quickly, which leads many organizations and teams to rush into solutions without identifying the customer satisfaction gaps that exist. This hinders them from creating a common shared understanding of a business problem to solve and prevents them from discovering more effective or creative ways to address the problem.
Without having a shared understanding of customer satisfaction gaps and the problems to solve, the organization and teams ultimately waste time, effort and money on building incorrect or suboptimal solutions that do not result in the desired outcomes their customers want.
Framing work as “problems to solve” instead of a list of solutions is a powerful approach that encourages teams to explore different perspectives and empathize with their customers and users. This practice also encourages team members to take ownership of creating products that meet customer and user needs.
Here are 5 tips to help you treat work as problems to solve.
1. Foster a problem-solving culture
A problem-solving culture is an organizational mindset where employees are encouraged and equipped to identify issues, analyze causes, and collaboratively find effective solutions.
This type of culture values curiosity, continuous improvement and a proactive approach to challenges. To foster a problem-solving culture, you must:
- Involve diverse perspectives from team members and stakeholders
- Encourage curiosity and questioning
- Encourage innovative thinking and conscious risk-taking
- Treat failure as part of the learning process
- Create a safe environment in which people can explore different perspectives without judgment and support constructive disagreement and debate
2. Create a shared understanding of the problem
Facilitate conversations to explore what problem you are trying to solve for the business. A business problem statement is a helpful tool to use as a foundation for this type of conversation because it poses an issue that a company is facing. Business problem statements help you understand the issue and set the foundation for measuring success before deciding how to solve it.
A business problem statement is a way to outline:
- What's wrong? (Problem)
- What do we want customers to feel or experience once it’s fixed? (Customer Outcome)
- How will fixing this problem help our business? (Business Impact)
Here are questions to discuss as you develop and refine your business problem statement:
- How is your current offering fulfilling your customers’ needs?
- What unmet needs do your customers have? What are their satisfaction gaps?
- Have there been changes in the market or customer behaviors?
- What problems are our customers facing in achieving their goals with our product?
3. Focus on customer outcomes and business impacts
Organizations often make assumptions about the problem or symptoms they are facing and miss the true business challenges they should address to be competitive. Focusing on the customer’s desired outcomes and the potential value that may bring the organization helps uncover the true opportunities and challenges for an organization.
Questions to help discover your customers’ desired outcomes and the related business impacts include:
- What does your customer want to achieve?
- What is their desired outcome?
- How would you expect their behavior to change if you met this need?
- What would you measure?
- What value and impact would pursuing this initiative bring to the business? What would you measure?
- Is pursuing this opportunity worthwhile for the organization?
While you are discussing these questions, continue to define a business problem statement while avoiding creating solutions. Focus on outcomes and impacts, keeping your problem in mind.
4. Don’t just assume; experiment and validate
As you start to consider solutions, use experiments to validate your assumptions. Through experimentation you might find out that the problem you identified is not the real problem your customers are trying to solve. Alternatively, you might also realize that the solution you had in mind would not solve the actual problem. Experiments can come in all shapes and forms. Overall, the less confident you are about the possible solution or problems to solve, the more lightweight your experiment should be. This reduces the risk, time, and effort of building something that is not fit for purpose.
Consider the example where a Scrum Team and internal stakeholders assume their users want a new feature to suggest customized product recommendations. After running a quick survey, users observations and a prototype test, they discover that users actually prefer the capability to filter through products. This experimental approach saves the team from investing time and money in a feature that would have missed the mark.
5. Use collaborative facilitation tools as a conversation tool to understand customer and business needs
Tools like the Lean UX Canvas, originally created by Jeff Gothelf, are a great conversation starter and enable a collaborative approach to fostering customer-centric discussions. The Lean UX canvas helps the team focus on the root cause of the problems they are trying to solve for their customers. It is important to note that the purpose of the canvas is to encourage richer conversations about the problem that the team is trying to solve in a collaborative manner (rather than filling in the template).
Another simple technique like the 5 Whys is also a way to reveal underlying causes through discussion. Asking "Why?" sounds simple, but answering it requires serious thought. Participants should search for answers that are grounded in fact, things that have actually happened, not guesses at what might have happened.
Conclusion
Framing work as problems to solve helps organizations and teams define a problem from the lens of their customers and users. Learnings influence their goals and also guide teams in developing solutions and products that resonate with the market.
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