Problem-Solution Fit: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing or Just Misused?
The number one reason innovations and start-ups fail is because we build something nobody wants. In other words, too many organisations still waste their time inventing solutions for non-existent customer needs! We start with “what” rather than “who” and “why”.
From experience, what this often looks like in start-ups and corporate innovation teams is they jump to a solution, fall in love with it (becoming very emotionally attached), and then almost blindly progress to writing a business plan, which becomes a recipe book for building, launching, and scaling their idea without any customer validation.
To counter this, Lean Startup practitioners introduced Problem-Solution Fit (PSF) as a way of saying ‘tools down’, ‘now before we progress from our solution to a business plan and start building something, let’s first of all go and talk to some potential customers and see if our solution actually solves a problem they want to see solved. And then once we have problem-solution fit we can progress.’
Problem-solution fit refers to the evidence that there is alignment between a customer's needs or pain points and the solution that an organisation offers through its product or service.
Whilst this is an improvement, starting with a solution and then trying to reverse engineer it to a problem isn’t the customer discovery-led approach that one might interpret the Problem-Solution Fit method to be. Instead, it is a classic example of ‘solution looking for a problem’ behaviour and a more apt name might be Solution-Problem Fit. Taking a solution-first approach to PSF is creating smoke and mirrors and not addressing the root cause, it is just a band-aid for jumping to the solution.
Another danger of taking this solution-problem fit approach is confirmation bias - because the individual or team are so emotionally attached to their idea, they listen to what they want to hear. And what they hear is yes.
In addition to confirmation bias, Problem-Solution Fit (or Solution-Problem Fit) done in the manner described above has a number of downsides:
1. For one, you are going to narrow too soon and limiting both your options and chances at success. When innovating, there could be multiple possible solutions for a given problem. The more rolls of the dice, the more chances of success.
2. Your solution is more likely to fail in customer testing because you haven’t started with an important and unmet need customers want to see solved.
3. If your solution fails in customer testing, you are left with nowhere else to go except back to the whiteboard and potentially more jumping to the solution.
4. And so, the continuous cycle of unnecessary and time-consuming pivoting and re-pivoting occurs: solution – test – fail – pivot solution – test – fail. Unfortunately, at some stage you must exit the pivot stage and launch something!
Now by all means if you’ve had an epiphany and think you’ve identified a solution that meets a customer need, then go test it.
However, if you want to increase your chances at success and/or are trying to build a sustainable innovation practice then start earlier and broader in the process with an opportunity area, not a solution, for example an emerging and/or growing market, a rising trend, an underserved customer segment or occasion. And then conduct a piece of discovery research and identify what important and unmet customer needs (or jobs-to-be-done) and pains exist that are worthy of solving! Once you’ve done that you can start generating solutions to solve these problems (needs/pains), followed by an iterative process of prototyping, testing, and learning until problem-solution fit is found or not (in which case the opportunity is discarded).
Regardless of whether PSF is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or it is actually being misused, we need to take the customer-led approach that I hope it was intended and has the potential to be. By doing that, not only will we improve our startup and innovation success rates, but we’ll also be creating products, services and experiences that our customers will love!
Nathan Baird is the founder of customer-driven innovation and growth firm Methodry and the author of Innovator’s Playbook: How to create great products, services, and experiences that your customers will love! He is one of the world’s most experienced Design Thinking practitioners, a former Partner of Design Thinking for KPMG, and helps teams build their innovation mastery and works alongside them to create innovations. Visit www.methodry.com.