Start with the Problem Statement

For all the talk about bad products and poorly designed features, many companies don’t spend enough time listening to the market. Some think they do, but they listen passively and only hear feature requests. What really helps drive a great product is to listen actively and hear problems.

Working within the problem-solution paradigm inherently demands that we accurately understand what the problems are. If we start from the incorrect starting point, following the correct path to a solution will cause us to solve the wrong problem.

This interesting article goes into linguistics and considers not just the language of problem statements in terms of the words we choose to write them in, but from the broader perspective of the framework in which we think about them. Abstracting the problem to the correct level is essential in solving the problem, which is what we are all trying to do.

~ by John Peltier on October 25, 2008.