The Importance of Problems

If it isn’t a problem, it isn’t a task for the product and development teams…

The other day I was talking with a colleague about how we break down the problem for each story, task and bug that we enter into our task system. We pretty quickly found ourselves in a debate as to whether or not everything entered actually had a problem that needed to be described. My thoughts were basically this: if all of the problems have been solved, then there is nothing left for the product and engineering teams to do. As product/software developers, that is our purpose — we build solutions and solutions solve problems.

Now, you could argue that when you are identifying the problem for a task, you are identifying the opportunity. Opportunities are not always problems. I would agree with that. If we were talking about a normal task system then I would tend to agree in that case. Sales teams have opportunities. Biz dev teams have opportunities. Marketing teams have opportunities. Many of these opportunities are great things with nothing inherently wrong with them. The difference with these teams though is that they are all the tip of the spear. They all have many pre-existing tools and their particular skillsets to help them transform an opportunity into something real, and often they are able to do so without involving the product or engineering team.

If a lead pops up, that's not a problem. Thats an opportunity to close a sale. Nothing is being fixed, nothing is being improved, nothing is being created (other than a sale of course). If somehow that sales opportunity makes its way to the engineering team — it’s no longer just an opportunity. At that point there is a problem blocking the sale or certain type of sale from moving forward and it's up to the product & engineering teams to solve it. It may just be that a new feature is needed, but without that feature the sale cannot move forward, so it's a problem that must be solved.

A problem is a type of opportunity, and it’s the only type of opportunity a product/development team needs to be focused on.

The Cool Idea

It’s possible for another type of opportunity to come from the development or product team. The “cool” idea. Let's say you have a messaging app and as a product manager you decide that it would be really cool if the app allowed you to poke someone (we all loved Facebook poke’s right?). It would make the app more “fun”. However if poking someone just seems like a fun thing to do, on its own does that feature really hold any weight to it? Without a solid idea of what is off about the product that it needs to be more fun, what value are you creating? Is that value worth spending time and resources needed to complete it?

In the early days when Facebook added the ability to poke a friend, people were not used to social media enough to just post anything. Many users didn’t know what to say or do. A poke was brilliant in that it was such a trivial way of saying hi to someone, and in the process getting them to sign-on and re-engage with the product — just so that they could poke back. It solved a problem and that problem was engagement. It was a type of platform that needed its users on it multiple times throughout the day to keep it vibrant, and poking was about as simple of a way as possible to get users to do that. No one really pokes anymore — the novelty has worn off, but that's ok, because the problem it solved is no longer a problem.

It Can Always Be Better

Another opportunity that I often see. Someone gets super excited about improving something that may already work pretty damn well — aka the perfectionist dilemma. I admit that I am susceptible to this as I too tend to be a perfectionist at certain things. We strive to create the best possible version of something.

A perfectionist sees themselves probably as a craftsman. Someone who only builds quality. Maybe though we are looking at quality the wrong way. Sure you could take something that already does its job pretty well and make it better — but is spending time solving problems, that no one actually feels, really bringing a higher quality to the product? What about when you factor in that there are other problems, real problems, that everyone does feel?

The perfectionist is probably the type of person this rant is most targeted towards — we need a reality check sometimes to keep us focused on what matters the most. And at the end of the day, you need to be focused on solving pains that people actually have, and not the pain of your ego.

TL;DR

If you are an entrepreneur, product designer, software developer, etc — you are a professional problem solver. It is at the the absolute core of what you do. Problems are the reason why your job exists. So why dance around it? Let's make it the most important thing we focus on — because we only have so much bandwidth to work on things. Let's make sure everyone on the team understands not only that we are trying to improve something, but also understand why it needs to be improved in the first place. Besides, solving problems kind of makes us superheros, and who doesn’t want to be a superhero?