Leading with problems at the early stage when we don’t yet know what we don’t know is quite prone to biases. When you ask a customer whether they have a particular problem, you open yourself to confirmation bias because you’re invested in the solution you have in mind. Second, you just biased your customer by leading them down a certain problem path. Even if they say they have that problem, it’s very hard to gauge how high the problem ranks in their world of other problems.
The key is recognizing that only solutions can be validated, problems are best discovered.
You have to first look at the bigger context.
The next step is exploring how they are doing this today and that’s where we find the problems.
It’s the Innovator’s Gift. The core premise of this framework is that new problems worth solving come from old solutions. You shouldn’t be inventing new problems, but rather searching for existing problems with what people are already using.
The key to innovation is causing a switch from an old way to a new way. There is always an old way. Show me a breakthrough product, and I’ll show you an old product people switched away from. The corollary is also true: Show me a product without an existing alternative and I’ll bet that product fails.