When you are building a product or business from the ground up, your success or failure will be defined by product-market fit. ‘Product-Market Fit’ is the degree to which the product or service you are creating is aligned with the needs and wants of a commercially viable group of customers in the market. The essential mission of every founding team is to achieve product-market fit before they run out of runway (the money they have raised from investors).

Beyond Product-Market Fit

However, most people don’t work in start ups or new product teams, most of us work with and for existing businesses of the going concern. Existing businesses (by the nature of their existence) have already achieved product-market fit. Their primary product is scaling or has scaled to meet the market and the organisation is focused on delivery.

While firms can (and do) lose product-market fit, most of the problems people encounter in their day-to-day work are not issues of whether your product meets the needs of your customer. Instead, they are more often internal problems of execution on how to best deliver on your product (improved quality, lower cost, faster speed, etc).

When your focus is on solving internal rather than customer problems, it can make it difficult to identify how design thinking can help people solve problems inside your business. Design thinking is a creative approach to problem solving that starts with the end user and works back to the solution. This means thoroughly understanding the end user, their experience, their needs and perspective on their problems, and how they might utilise any given solution.

By contrast, business problems rarely present themselves in this way. Business problems are more often discussed in terms of metrics, (“We need to fix our turnover problem, it’s costing us a fortune!”, “Our return on assets is the lowest of our competitors”) or subjective assessments (“Our technology is outdated”, “We need a more innovative culture”).

Users don’t get funded, problems get funded

Because in business we naturally focus first on solving problems, it is problems, not users, that get funded. Every project, initiative and transformation program will start with a problem statement as the vision or mission to be overcome.

Resources are assembled and experts are enlisted to solve the problem. Being quite clever, these teams will often create intricate, interesting and expensive solutions. These solutions are deployed with great fanfare and a precession of change managers only to die a long, slow and painful death.

The reason? A lack of user-problem fit.

User-Problem Fit

One tried and true method of trying to appear smart in meetings is to suggest everyone take a step back and ask “what is the problem we are really trying to solve here?”. While a question like this might build your reputation, it will also misdirect your energy to reasserting your business problem.

Delivering on change means keeping people focused on a shared mission, but focusing on the wrong shared mission will only help you move more uniformly towards failure. Instead of focusing on ‘what problem’ you are trying to solve, start first with identifying ‘who’s problem’ you are trying solve.

User-problem fit is the identification of the people who face problems that, if solved, would also subsequently resolve the business problem. Clarifying user-problem fit means focusing first on ‘who’ rather than ‘what’.

Business problems can be hairy things that impact many diverse groups. Rolling out a new IT system, updating the procurement process, rewriting the brand guidelines, any activity that impacts the business will impact a broad range of diverse people we like to collectively lump into the homogenous bucket we call ‘stakeholders’.

Beyond Stakeholder Management

To find user-problem fit, we must first unpack our stakeholders into distinct users or user groups. These are groups of people who share common needs, uses, beliefs and values as they relate to their shared problem and would be the users of any potential solution.

By adopting a design thinking approach in first seeking to understand the problems people are facing and then working to primarily resolve their problems, we change the way we treat people. People are no longer stakeholders to be ‘managed’ into a predetermined solution to the problem faced by the business. Stakeholders instead become users of solutions to their problems, who will define the success or failure of any solution you create.

Empathy for the user

To design for our users requires us to put the business problem to one side and, with empathy, try to listen and understand their problems. The goal is not to simply hear and register their grievances, but to specifically and deeply understand the user’s problems from their own perspective.

This will then allow you to begin to identify and prioritise the problems the users face which, if you solved or alleviated, would subsequently resolve your business problem. When you are able to successfully identify the key user problems which, if resolved, will also resolve your business problem, you have achieved User-Problem fit. Your challenge now? Solve it!

User-Problem Fit in action

“We are grossly under resourced”

A general manager of a maternity service faced a common problem shared by many in public healthcare, too much demand and not enough resources to meet it. Their business problem was their service was dramatically over subscribed and they didn’t have the money or people to serve their patients.

It was causing major issues both for staff who were over worked and for patients with not even enough chairs for them to sit down. Health services, unlike music festivals, should never be standing room only.

The manager’s initial view, like many before them, was to pursue an application for increased funding. However, in healthcare they might very well have better luck getting blood from a stone.

Instead, by engaging with outside help, the team was able to reconsider the business problem (‘We need more resources’) in the context of the user experiences of patients and staff. By exploring the problems first faced by the patients and then by the staff, this process identified that there were activities in the current design which were costly to the maternity service, unenjoyable for the staff and a burden on the patients.

The team had discovered its user-problem fit. By reworking the design of this service, rather than near doubling costs through expansion, the team were instead able to reduce their workload while also reducing the burden on patients, improving both patient and staff experience all without the need for additional funding.

Embracing User-Problem Fit

Embracing User-Problem Fit may initially feel like you are taking on even more problems. Your task is hard enough without having to think about other problems as seen by other people.

However, by investing in finding user-problem fit early, you will instead set your project up for a far greater chance of success. Identifying user problems and working to find those that fit with your business problem will help you understand both more deeply. This will allow you to develop more robust, resilient and ultimately more successful solutions for both your users and your business.