Following from our user research, we have a deeper understanding of what’s causing our audience’s problems, why they need them solved, and the impact of not solving them.

So let's solve them.

Remember, if you have more than one type of audience, apply these methods to all of them.

We'll starting by looking at what makes for successful problem solving.

Kids are the experts

We solve problems every day; never more so than as children.

If you have children of your own, or have ever watched kids playing, you’ll see the unbridled power of creativity. Unafraid of making mistakes, willing to try anything, employing divergent thinking, waves of imagination.

Many creatives discuss this subject, and how to be more child-like in their approach to creating.

Over analysing, stress, other priorities and real life, all get in the way of our adult creative abilities. Yet to solve problems innovatively, successfully, we often need the spark of ingenuity, present in uninhibited thought.

The reason for taking so much time to understand a problem, is that we need to free up more thought capacity for creativity. It’s unhelpful to both try and understand a problem and solve it simultaneously.

There is much research which shows creative, innovative ideas appear from subconscious thought. Your brainwave in the shower, the 3am ‘next big idea’ that wakes you up, the thing you need to write down on the drive to work. By settling the problem into your brain, and not consciously trying to understand it, you’re enabling the creative thought processes to wash over the issues at hand.

So as you work through solving the problems of your audience, pay attention to your mood and the environment around you. Creativity should ideally come from a fearless place, it should be fun, exciting, engaging.

In the same way a clean kitchen with everything at hand is a more enjoyable place to cook, take time to understand how to help set your headspace to one of creativity.

Some find having a space they can go to, comfortable and quiet, helps them get into the right frame of mind. Exercise can help burn off angst, the same as dancing, listening to music, meditation. Doing something creative for a short time, just for fun, like drawing, playing an instrument, building Lego (yes really), puzzles, can all help you enter an innovative mode.

So be more like a kid.

The need for nexus

Great products are almost always the result of more than one set of ideas, research, or other products, brought together to solve a problem in a new way; at the nexus of convergent innovations.

The lightbulb, a trope and cliché to discuss, is regardless, still a great example of innumerable advances in material science and physics, combining to create something groundbreaking.

Instagram could not have existed without camera smartphones, the Internet and apps.

Venice in the middle ages became a superpower in large part due to being the centre of trade and immigration routes; a literal nexus of people, culture, ideas, needs and commerce.

Mixing these elements together created huge advances, scientifically, artistically and commercially. The same is true of many superpowers throughout history.

Therefore I try to capture that magic, albeit fractionally, converging different ideas and products, to help generate solutions in the creative process - solving problems requires creative thinking. The inspiration is not just in technology, and not necessarily digital. Being surrounded by interesting items, oddities, inspirational art, as well as incredible tech products is a powerful way to energise yourself, and begin brainstorming possible solutions.

If your concept is a way for parents to connect with childcarers for example, looking at other problems which needed to connect more than one type of user would be helpful for inspiration. That could be Airbnb (hosts and guests), eBay (buyers and sellers), Blow (beauty therapists and customers). Looking at how successful products and services overcame similar problems not only gives you confidence the issues can be solved, but also might allow you to borrow their experiments, saving you a lot of time.

Sometimes your concept may not seemingly have any direct parallels; take the iPhone. Although there were other smartphones at the time, they’re nothing like we associate with the term smartphone today. However you could break down the concept into smaller problems, and look at parallel solutions for inspiration. Steve Jobs at the Keynote in 2007, said they were introducing three revolutionary products:

"The first one: is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.
The second: is a revolutionary mobile phone.
And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device."

Of course now we know these were combined into a single device, and the breakthrough was the concept of a new consumer platform, which ran applications third-parties could develop (and sold through an online store), controlled with a touch screen - no physical keyboard. This new platform enabled one of the greatest leaps in consumer tech we’ve ever seen. But if we break down the problems it was solving, we could see extant analogous products from which to draw inspiration.

iPod: iPod, Zune
Mobile phone: Samsung F700, LG Prada (both had touchscreen)
Internet comms device: Samsung F700, LG Prada (yes, they had browsers too)

The convergence of existing technologies, wrapped up in a big idea was the breakthrough. The iPhone was the next generation of personal computer.

The iPhone didn't appear out of nowhere. It was the combination of existing solutions, and some new ones, revolutionary user experience, and a powerful ecosystem, that was the breakthrough. The big idea.

This big idea found its market. Bewilderingly so.

First steps to product/market fit

At the core to our discovery phase is the goal of creating a prototype to prove people want and need our product. It’s the first test in achieving product/market fit, a term coined by Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley legend, inventor of the modern web browser, and VC thought leader.

Marc’s definition is seemingly simple:

"Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market."

Why is this important? Along with your team, it’s the basis upon which any successful business is founded.

Interchange product with service and it’s applicable to all business success stories. I’ll provide a quick summary, but I’d encourage you to read his post about the subject here 12 things about product market fit.

Let’s break out the two core components Marc cites in his definition.

Good market: Lots of people share the same problem, who can pay to solve it, and willing to adopt a new product.

Satisfactory product: A product which solves the market’s problem, to the point where people are sharing it word of mouth and it’s difficult to keep up with demand.

It sounds obvious that you need both of these components for success, but there are far, far more examples of products which didn’t find their market, than those that did. It's hard to do. It often takes many iterations and experiments to find a good market, and it's this realisation that plays a large part in why you might hear the term 'pivot' so often in startup and product circles. Changing course, changing your market, changing your product, all because product/market fit wasn't achieved.

Take Twitch, originally Justin.TV, a website which broadcast a reality show of Justin Kan, started in 2007. Later the team stopped the show, and the site instead allowed its users to broadcast any content to an unlimited number of users (pivot 1). Still not finding commercial success, but noticing people were broadcasting themselves playing video games, the team created a new site (whilst Justin.TV still ran), naming it Twitch, dedicated to gamers (pivot 2). Then in 2014 Twitch sold to Amazon for $970m. Perseverance, adaptation and customer focus led the team to huge success.

Early in the book we identified possible problems to solve, analysed the market, connected with our audience and dug deep into their needs. We did this to improve our chances of finding a good market. Our next step is to create the prototype for a satisfactory product, which relies on us solving the right problems.

We won’t go much further into the theory around product/market fit here. Once we’ve created a prototype at the end of this chapter which has found the right market, we’ll see how to fully realise the product/market fit concept in the next phase; ‘Adoption’.

NB: Product/market fit means different things to different people. If you manage to create a product which makes thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions in revenue, for you and I, that would mean you've developed a satisfactory product for a good market. We'd achieved product/market fit. For venture capitalists however, a good market would mean you're able to make hundreds of millions, if not billions in revenue. Just because your product may not make astronimical sums of money, it doesn't meant not a winning product.

Keeping product/market fit in mind will help us tie together the different elements of our product, as we progress, and help explain why we'll focus so much on prototyping.

The right problems

Our time and resources are limited. Regardless of whether you're Amazon, or starting a business in your parents' garage.

We can only work on solving a limited number of problems. Therefore choosing the right problems to work on will mean the success or failure of our product.

We need a method to make sure we're always working on what's most important, as our product evolves and adapts to our users' needs over time.

Good products are in fact tens, hundreds, if not thousands of micro solutions to micro problems.

The best products often evolve over time, built in order of the most pressing needs first.

This might appear daunting to the uninitiated, but it’s empowering - we don’t have a single, monolithic solution to get right in one go, but instead lots of smaller answers to problems we can deal with, one at a time.

We'll inevitably make some mistakes in choosing which problems to solve, so it's better if the solutions to these problems are small and tested quickly.

Following from our user research chapter, we should have documented the problems our audience currently faces. Our next job is to look at what we have to solve immediately, and what we can leave for another day.

If you’re speaking with your audience frequently, and continuing to research, you’ll find there are innumerable problems you could solve. But not all of them need to be, and most likely only a fraction require solving, to create a truly compelling product.

In a later chapter, we’ll try creating a basic built prototype to test whether we’re solving our users’ core problems. We won’t find success however, if we’re solving the ‘wrong’ problems.

By identifying what needs to be solved now, and crucially what doesn’t, we can spend our valuable time and energy in the right places.

Let’s look at Airbnb again. Nearly 13,000 employees globally, working to help people find great places to stay. Yet it began with a simple product, which evolved countless times to become the tech titan it is today. But before that, it began with an even simpler, now well known experiment.

The short version. In San Francisco, 2007, two poor unemployed industrial design graduates were struggling to make rent. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia noticed hotels were fully-booked for an upcoming design conference. Buying some airbeds, and setting up a poorly-built website (called Air Bed and Breakfast), they managed to find three conference attendees to pay to stay at their apartment. This was their prototype. It’s now Silicon Valley lore, and an important story that illustrates the value of experimentation. The founders had no idea that this concept would eventually become the success story it has today, but the willingness to try things, often due to necessity, has no-doubt given rise to this type of innovation throughout human history.

In fact, the pair may have been able to attract guests without the need for a website; by calling conferences and offering their number as an alternative, or placing an ad on sites the guests were likely to visit in the run-up to the conferences, they may have been able to secure bookings. I only make that point because we should avoid bloating our solution, at all times. It worked out alright for them, though.

Remember, the bigger our prototype, the more solutions we’re testing, and the harder it is to know what’s working, and crucially what isn’t. If you took five different medications to cure an ailment, how would you know which one worked?

There's more to creating a standout product than focusing on the obvious problems however.

Big ideas

Using the parent and childcarer example again, if we simply connected the two parties, say by enabling people to share phone numbers, we could say we solved the problem. There’s a missed opportunity though. Airbnb could have just been a website with a list of places to stay alongside a phone number. Still solving a problem, but again, missing something.

What I’m pointing to is the wider user experience, and an ecosystem.

If I booked an airbed on which to stay, from a long list on a website, I’d probably be concerned about my safety, whether the accommodation was clean, about payment, whether the place was real etc. By addressing these concerns which comprise the wider user experience, there’s the early signs of a big idea; to make booking and staying at someone else’s home, feel like a boutique hotel.

Airbnb doesn’t express its proposition in this way, but it has been my experience. Which is what counts. With it, there’s an ecosystem of hosts, guests, and a huge number of roles within the business to make it work. The iPhone relied on an ecosystem of third-party developed apps, as well as integration with Apple’s own products (hardware and software), all of which hugely enhanced the overall user experience.

Your audience will tell you the problems they need solving, but they won't tell you what your big idea should be.

By thinking through and redesigning the entire customer experience, Airbnb are now dominating hospitality in a way the founders didn’t even foresee. Creating hundreds of thousands of new accommodations, in unique locations, with reviews, secure transactions, consistently described, across continents.

It's often said no-one knew they needed an iPhone. Users told Apple the problems they faced, but it was Apple's vision, their big idea, how they solved the problems which determined the product's astronomical trajectory. But like I said earlier, it didn't appear from nowhere. It was the act of combining elements, most of which existed, where the breakthrough appeared.

If we just focus on solving problems, we won’t see the wood for the trees. But the reverse is true also. We need to conceive of a forest, and plant the trees to make it happen.

Okay, fine; but how?

In the user research chapter, we saw how to lay out the steps to solve a problem manually. At the high level, those steps would enable a guest to book accommodation with a host. Deciding which of those steps to solve with our product (direct solutions), along the experience we’re trying to provide (user experience), and how all the parts of the puzzle fit together (ecosystem), will almost entirely shape our product. Together, I think of them as the pillars of our big idea, and we should consider each one when creating it.

Big ideas = direct solutions + experience + ecosystem

Let's quickly evaluate the iPhone in light of the 'big idea' concept. The iPhone offered multiple direct solutions (apps, phone, camera, internet), focused on a very wide user experience (touchscreen, easy to use, digitally ergonomic), and created a huge ecosystem (internet access, connectivity with other Apple products, an App store).

Amazon at the time of writing this, is the most valuable company in the world. Amazon the website, can be considered a product in its own right. Jeff Bezos maniacally focuses on the best customer experience, anywhere. They’ve amassed a huge number of small direct solutions, deliver a best-in-class customer experience, and integrated third-parties to create a bonafide revolution in its ecosystem (Prime’s next-day delivery).

I use these examples because they’re so well known, but the principles are applicable to products at any size. If you’re looking at creating a seemingly niche product, conceiving of a big idea to transform it from just a solution, to game-changer, could be the difference between moderate success and a runaway hit.

Conversely, sometimes the big idea is to stay small.

Recognise what your users care about most and focus clearly on what matters. Sometimes the experience is very limited and there is no wider user experience, or ecosystem.

A matchbox has matches and a striking surface, can be carried around, and creates fire. Its big idea is portable fire. The direct solutions are simple, the experience is making it portable and easy to strike, and it doesn't require other products or services to make it work, so no ecosystem is required. Each has been considered in its creation though. You could over-engineer a box of matches, for example to have different length matches in the same box, glow in the dark lettering to find the matches at night, a guide with each box on how to set a fire. These would create a bloated product, with features many people wouldn’t require, but yet everyone would have to pay for (as the cost of those solutions is included in every product sold).

A cautionary tale

Juicero is a fine example of a bloated product with an unnecessary features, experience and ecosystem. Where the big experience was just too big.

The Juicero was an appliance which created vegetable and fruit juice, by crushing pre-filled packs of produce (which had a shelf-life of 8 days). It reduced the cleaning required after juicing, which is an issue when using regular blenders.

It began life at a price of $699 (later $399), with subscriptions to its produce pouches, costing between $5-$7 per portion. You scanned a produce pouch (it didn’t operate if you tried using another brand’s produce pouch), placed it in the Juicero, and it crushed the sealed fruit and vegetables in the bag, producing juice.

I first read about the product in 2015 and couldn’t understand the ‘big idea’; avoiding some cleaning, by laying out hundreds for a juicer, and paying dollars not cents, for produce that came in sealed pouches, meaning you couldn’t create your own recipes for juices. Who was this for? Who had such an issue with cleaning after making juice, that they'd go to this extreme? I couldn't figure out who would buy one, unless I’d misunderstood its market, which is likely. Look up Homer Simpson's car design for reference.

In 2017, 4 years and $120m of investment later, Bloomberg News reported that the Juicero pouches could be squeezed by hand, producing similar results to the Juicero, rendering the appliance useless. Later that year, the company closed, looking for a buyer of its intellectual property.

I felt that irrespective of this revelation, the perceived cost of having to clean a blender was much, much less than the huge initial, and ongoing costs of using the Juicero. Also I consider being locked into using its proprietary produce pouches was anti-user. It created problems for its users, it didn't solve them, all in the interests of protecting its income.

Prioritising problems

I view problems as the seed from which products spring. A problem has causes, a trigger, and impact if not solved.

All great products and services are solutions to problems.

Deoderant aims to solve body odour. A drinking glass solves the problem of holding liquid in a convenient drinkable quantity. Twitter solves the problem of enabling people to communicate their thoughts to a bigger audience. Problems are at the heart of every great product.

We've been mining the problems of our audience through different methods, and have captured their problems in a way we can begin to examine.

Let’s look at how to prioritise problems, so that we’re only working on what needs solving.

We need to prioritise the list of problems, from those that absolutely must be solved now, to those that can wait.

There are a large number ‘ranges’ and ‘models’ people use to prioritise user needs and problems. From 1 to 5 (1 being critical, 5 being unimportant), through MoSCoW (must, should, could, would haves), to plotting multidimensional graphs. However, after having tried many, my experience is that almost always problems end up on either end of a spectrum. Those that must be solved, and those that are less important.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t consider many different factors in our method, but we can only generally solve one problem at a time. Therefore a clear ordered list, from first to last, is the most efficient and clearest way to figure out what to tackle now, so we have no excuses for not taking action.

Your audience has already spoken to you about the problems they face. They’ll have expressed and emphasised some more than others. The impact those problems create if they’re not solved, also tell us about the severity of these issues.

The user journey(s) you mapped out in the User Research chapter shows us the steps to solving the overall problem, providing us with a list of smaller problems to overcome.

We'll now start to see the value in creating these maps.

In the Airbnb example, let’s look at the most pressing needs of our audience. Labelling problems as being high priority or low priority gives us the starting point for prioritisation. Our audience have probably told us the steps in the journey are all very important (most high-level steps in a journey are important). The first step in the journey is deciding locations and dates. This is high priority, but probably not something we can solve - the user will come to us with those things in mind most likely. We need to capture the dates and location though, so the problem of capturing this info is high priority (and it will be part of searching for accommodations).

Searching for accommodation is next. This is impossible however, if there isn’t a list of places to stay, and if they can’t find anywhere to stay, the entire process stops dead. So searching is high priority, but we need a list of places before searching can happen. We've just identified another problem (needing accommodations), which is high priority.

Comparing and booking accommodation are very important, but impossible to do (as mentioned above), if there are no places to stay. High priority, but can't happen without searching.

Confirming availability, paying for accommodations and confirming the booking, all have to happen to complete the process. However they’re reliant on the comparing and booking steps, therefore they’re high priority, but reliant on the preceding steps.

As you can see, by working through the user journey we’ve identified the first problem, which is having accommodations to book, and being able to search through them. Logically there have to be accommodations to book, before you can search, therefore accumulating a list of those accommodations is our first problem to solve. We’ve worked our way to the problem, which, if we don’t solve it, means no other steps in the process can be taken.

Now let's put them in a table, so we can clearly lay them out in the order they need to be solved.

Don't be daunted by getting the list in a perfect order, go with what seems logical. We can always change this list at any point.

I very highly recommend using a card-sorting system (instead of a table or spreadsheet), like the product Trello, which is free. You'll quickly find how powerful they are.

I've shown my examples in tables, just because it's easier to present this information on a page this way. Card-sorting software (try Trello), allows you to create a digital card (where you'd write the problem and other notes for example), and place it in a vertical list, which you can prioritise by moving the cards higher or lower in the list. The table I've shown above could be converted into cards very easily - each row is in effect, a unique card. You can create vertical lists next to each other, to create a workflow. Take a to-do list. One list to the left-hand side saying 'To-do', the next to its right is 'Doing', and the last is 'Done'. You can then move cards from one list to another to track your progress. This seemingly simple way of organising your work is how many of the largest software products in the world are managed. Its simplicity and versatility is its power.

Once we've gone through the process of listing out these problems in a priority order (including those which are low priority), let's focus on the first.

This problem of needing a list of accomodations to book, is made up of smaller problems to solve. We need to decide what type of accommodation we want to list, where they should be located, how much they should cost, how we find them, or how the owners of the accommodations find us. We’ll also need to attract them with a business pitch on why they should list their property.

We're now getting down to a level of detail, where we could start solving these problems. In this example, it's a really to-do list. Go research places to stay, find other platforms with accommodation and invite those hosts to list on your product etc.

As mentioned in the User Research chapter, if you have more than one audience, ensure you apply this method to all your audience types.

Now we've identified which problems need to be solved, let's put what we've covered so far in this chapter, into action. Let's get creative and solve problems.

Inventing our big idea

We’ve spoken about big ideas, and how they’re comprised of direct solutions, experiences and ecosystems. Let’s use the childcarer product as our example, to work through each of these pillars, forming the structure of our big idea.

By prioritising problems to ensure we’re working on the right ones, we only need to focus on those that have to be solved - those which are high priority. Let’s imagine, similar to the Airbnb example, our first problem to solve is finding childcarers who will offer services through our product. The supply-side, you could call it.

Research your nexus
Before we begin working through each problem, can you find examples of products solving similar problems? What can you learn from them to address this particular problem? Write them down, bear them in mind, borrow their ideas.

Sitting comfortably?
Make sure as we discussed earlier in the chapter, that you're in a creative mindset. A happy place. A productive mode.

OK, let’s hold up our first problem and see what we need from each pillar, to create the first slice of our big idea.

Direct solutions: How can we find childcarers who want to offer services through our platform? If we've followed the advice in this book, we'll already be connected to them as an audience (audience development). On top of this, perhaps we could speak to organisations that certificate childcare and be promoted to their members. We could advertise on social media, simply posting that we’re looking to find childcarers to join our new platform. These are all possible ways to find childcarers.

User experience: What is the experience we want our parents to feel when using our product? Safe, simple, reliable. That means when finding childcarers, we need to ensure they have background checks, we’re upfront about who they are, they’re easy to deal with and they’ll turn up when you book them. How will we do that? We’ll need some way to vet them before they offer services through the product. Once they’re using the product, we’ll need to monitor them ongoing, so ensuring their criminal checks and certifications haven’t expired. Maybe asking parents to review them too, and tracking things like how quickly they respond to jobs. Implementing some of these now adds a layer of experience which means our direct solutions, are more likely to be a hit.

Ecosystem: We’ve partially covered this, but to make this product work, it’s not just a technical solution, not just a ‘website’. We’re going to be reliant on third-parties to make it work. Those being parents and childcarers. We may want to create our own communities for these two groups, around our product, to feed into it, and to help grow both user groups. We may require third-party certification of childcarers, an organisation we partner with to ensure quality. These considerations are the beginnings of piecing together an ecosystem which strengthen our product, and once again, aren’t just ordinary solutions.

Hopefully you can see by taking a problem, and looking at it through the lens of each of these pillars, you think divergently, thoroughly, and start piecing together an overall customer proposition that feels much stronger than just 'solving problems'. The beginnings of a big idea.

Let's look at fairly benign problem; payments. You could break this down into a further user journey (like we drew in User Research), thinking through the nuances for buying services, which is different to buying an item. Parents may not want to pay until the services is delivered, whereas childcarers want guarantee of payment if they deliver the services successfully. How do other products which allow services to be bought and sold approach this? Dog walkers, hospitality, education, would likely all have encountered this problem.

The direct solution might be to allow cash to be exchanged by the two parties, although this would likely lack the security both types of user would want, and therefore not deliver on the experience they need (it’s still an option though). Using a third-party solution like PayPal could be a good option, who would be a partner and therefore part of our ecosystem., Or maybe parents buy credits which are exchanged exclusively on your site, requiring its own payment solution you’d have to build. These are all options worth noting down, each considered in relation to direct solutions, user experience and ecosystem. We’ll then evaluate them (in the next chapter) and decide what to include in our prototype product.

Add another column to your table, or a note to your card (if using something like Trello), with your suggested solutions. Work through each problem which requires solving until you have a set of problems which need solving, and the big idea approach in solving them.

Bear in mind, these are also our first attempts at solving these problems. We might be wrong, we might be right, but we'll find out by trying them, quickly, cheaply, efficiently, in the Unbuilt Prototypes chapter.

As with most disciplines, problem solving in a creative way is a skill to develop, and the process of trial and many, many errors.

Most of your ideas will be bad. But that’s good. By giving ourselves the freedom to create bad ideas, we can give up on worrying if we haven’t had many or any good ideas. If we only had good ideas, there’s a good chance you’re not creating enough options to choose from. The same goes for, and is possibly more important, when working with others to solve problems as a group. No idea is a bad idea, should be your mentality.

One guiding principle to bear in mind, is that we should think of what the solution does, not what it is. Try not to the think ‘an app’, ‘a website’, ‘a marketplace’.

Think instead ‘something that allows parents to find and book childcarers’. We leave our options open to many more potential solutions this way, and focus solely on solving the problem. The platform the product is accessible through (e.g. app, website etc) is a technical and commercial decision for another day.

Now it's time to test out our big idea.

CHECKLIST

Have you got some solutions worth testing?

Mindset
You've taken time to understand how to enter an innovative mode of thought.

Nexus
You've looked at other solutions to similar problems.

Big idea
You've looked beyond the detail to understand your users' problems in the context of direct solutions, user experience and ecosystems.

List of solutions
You've created a list of problems, in priority order, each with a number of potential solutions (no matter how crazy).