Problem-Solution Fit Is Flawed
It's a band-aid. It doesn't fix the root cause of why teams invent cool sh*t nobody wants.
We’ve all been in, or experienced, the product or innovation team that jumps to a solution, falls in love with it (becoming emotionally attached), and then almost blindly progresses to writing a business plan, which then becomes a recipe book for building, launching, and scaling our idea without any customer validation.
To counter this, Problem-Solution Fit (PSF) was introduced as a way of saying, “Tools down. 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.
While 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 just a band-aid; it does not address the root cause of the issue, which is jumping to the solution.
Problem-Solution Fit conducted in this manner has several downsides:
1. Confirmation bias – because the team is so emotionally attached to their idea, they listen to what they want to hear in customer testing. And what they hear is yes.
2. Going too narrow too soon – limiting 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 higher the chances of success.
3. Higher likelihood of failure – your solution is more likely to fail in customer testing because you haven’t started with an important and unmet need that customers want to see solved.
4. Limited options after failure – 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.
5. Continuous cycle of pivoting – 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!
Four Principles for Getting Problem-Solution Fit Right
1. Opportunity before solution.
Start earlier and broader in the process with an opportunity area, not a solution—for example, an emerging or growing market, a rising trend, an underserved customer segment or occasion.
2. Evidence before emotion.
Conduct discovery research and identify what important and unmet customer needs (or jobs-to-be-done) and pains exist that are worthy of solving. Fall in love with the problem, not the idea.
3. Multiple options before commitment.
Once the needs and pains are clear, generate multiple potential solutions. Go wide before narrowing. Innovation is a probability game — increase your odds.
4. Experimentation before execution.
Follow an iterative process of prototyping, testing, and learning until problem-solution fit is found — or not, in which case the opportunity is discarded.
By starting with the problem—not the solution—and following a disciplined discovery and experimentation process, teams can dramatically increase their chances of success.
Stop jumping to solutions. Start with what truly matters to your customers. The results speak for themselves, and over time, this approach builds a sustainable product or innovation practice that consistently delivers value.
Happy innovating,
Nathan
I am the founder of customer-driven innovation and growth firm Methodry and author of Innovator’s Playbook, published by Wiley. I help teams build their innovation mastery and work alongside them to innovate on their most important challenges.
Originally published March 2024; this is a revised version.