Most of the products that solve problems for us, we don’t buy. Most of the products that improve our life in some manner, we don’t even know about. CB Insights says 42% of product startups fail because there’s “no market need”. As designers, we are haunted by the question and the consequences of solving the wrong problem. But what is the “right” problem and how can we identify it?

Not every problem stems from human factors or user experience. If I work to understand someone’s user experience pain points to a cars usability or study touch-points to make sure a user can have a smooth ride to purchase and consumption; those things tell me nothing about how that user might be better served by a bicycle rather than a car.

“The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter.” — Russel Ackoff, Grandfather of Systems Thinking

Before we get into how we can start to build the right thing and solve the right problem, let me quickly talk about what a problem is.

What is a “problem”?

“A problem arises when a living creature has a goal but does not know how this goal is to be reached. Whenever one cannot go from the given situation to the desired situation simply by action. . .” — Duncker, 1945, p. 1

A problem exists when an undesirable current situation forms a motivation to reach the vision of an unmet goal, but in the process there is a struggle to realize those unmet goals.

A problem does not exist when the goals looking to be met have no barriers to being reached, when the unmet goal has no appetite to be satisfied or when the current situation does not form an unmet goal.

Examples of non-problems:

Asking what 2+2 is: In this case, you likely intuitively know the answer and nothing gets in the way of answering the questions, therefore there’s no struggle to meet the goal.

Traffic isn’t a problem when I work from home: Very obvious example, but it shows that when the current situation doesn’t motivate for the desired outcome to get to my office on time. This problem no longer exists, essentially the user is in a space where the problem isn’t.

“Not all problems are created equal”

The topic of solving the right user problem usually comes up when a team is looking to launch a new product. We ask ourselves “what is the right problem to solve” because solving the “right” problem can lead to designing a desirable and lucrative product. But the most likely scenario is a designer solves a problem that nobody has or that nobody cares enough to have solved. As a designer its easy to stare at someone long enough and imagine how you could improve a user’s life, only to be dumbfounded when nobody adopts your solution. Why is this happening? If I solved a problem shouldn’t that person want my solution that solves a problem?

“Not all problems are created equal” — Ali Hussain, VP of Design at American Specialty Health

Solving the “right” problem is more about enabling people to do something that they wanted to already do, but they struggle to or can’t. This question about what is the “right” problem to solve really boils down to one question. Where does customer demand come from? Because a problem is not sufficient to cause someone to adopt a product, but when the motivation and the struggle to reach an unmet desire becomes strong enough, that problem turns into demand.

Where demand comes from is key to understanding what separates solving a problem vs unlocking where there is demand for a problem to be solved.

Where does customer demand come from

This is an odd example but follow me here. I used to live in an house where we had a washing machine in-house and at the time I had those liter jugs of Tide detergent to wash my clothes and I never thought much of it. Then I moved to an apartment complex without an in-house washing machine, instead we had a shared laundry room downstairs with other tenants. Now with the shared laundry room downstairs I had to carry everything downstairs. I always did everything I could to carry everything in one trip, so I carried as much as I could on a single trip and always kept dropping my detergent or socks and towels. It was a balancing act on the way downstairs or two trips. Finally, one day I forgot the Tide jug downstairs and when I came back it was stolen. At this point I had it and I was finally in the market for something else. There’s got to be a better way.

“Questions are spaces in the mind for solutions to fall into” — Clayton Christensen

When I had a washing machine at home and I heard about TidePods, I never even thought twice about them, but now it was exactly what I needed. How well does it smell? How well does it clean? Don’t care. Now I don’t have to make double the trips, I don’t have to worry about getting my detergent stolen and I don’t have to carry extra jugs of along with my laundry.

“People only notice a mattress store when they’ve started to have bad sleep”. — Bob Moesta, Co-Founder of Jobs-to-be-done

Demand comes from a build-up of moments and scenarios that put me in a situation where I wanted to wash my clothes but I didn’t or struggled to. Because of that, I was in the market, not because of my “Eduardo-ness” or my personal attributes. It’s the build-up of situational factors that create demand for a problem to be solved.

For a problem to turn into demand its got to break through that cycle of repetitiveness. Demand is created because something changed and what I used to do won’t work anymore. Now I want to do something better or I want to reach an unmet desire but I struggle to achieve it. There needs to be that domino cause and effect that catalyzes into demand.

You’ll know if a problem has broken through cycle of repetitiveness if someone is already trying to solve it themselves with workarounds or by stretching a product to do more than it’s supposed to. Also often you might find that there are “compensating behaviors” or ways of dealing with what isn’t working.

Nobody wants your product until they want what it enables them to do. To get this clarity about what someone wants to be able to do, you need to understand the struggle that caused them to shape that idea and motivation of an unmet goal. If you can uncover that, you have a good bet of solving the “right” problem.

Reference and rabbit holes

A lot of the topics covered here stem from Jobs-to-be-done. Bob Moesta is the co-creator of the Jobs-to-be-done theory along with Clayton Christensen. A great book about the methods of of this theory are covered in Bob Moestas Book “Demand-Side Sales 101”. https://www.amazon.com/Demand-Side-Sales-101-Customers-Progress-ebook/dp/B08FRRF68Q

Clayton Christensen is an absolute legend. Known for coming up with the theory of disruptive innovation and in his book “Competing Against Luck” he talks about his theory of Jobs-to-be-done. https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Customer/dp/0062435612

Karl Duncker is one of the founder of gestalt psychology, he also has a lot of great work about creative problem solving and the nature of problems themselves. https://www.worldcat.org/title/on-problem-solving/oclc/968793

‼️ I’ll be writing 2 more articles here on Medium before I go exclusively on my Substack blog called Tangent. If you liked this article and are interested in how we design for humans today and how we might design for them in the future, subscribe to Tangent for free. Next article comes out in early September.

💬 Comment or reply to me: what you think qualifies as the “right” problem to solve? How do you diagnose that it is indeed the “right” problem?