Biasing with Problem Statements

Good product management is understanding the problems your customers want to solve, how your customers get value from solving those problems, and figuring out how best to help them. We need a little help to actually understand those problems from the customer’s point of view. Even good product managers will start with the wrong thinking, and organizations are commonly solving the wrong problems because of this.

Anchoring

Good product management is choosing the right way to solve a problem; great product management is choosing the right way to frame the opportunity. Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg has a great example in What’s Your Problem? where he contrasts approaches to the problem of slow elevators in tall hotels.

Adding additional elevators, or upgrading the existing elevators to be faster are both prohibitively expensive solutions for an existing hotel, and often impractical when planning the design of a new hotel. Instead of framing the problem as “people wait too long for the elevator,” you can reframe the problem to “people are unhappy with waiting too long for the elevator.” By adding a distraction – in particular, a large mirror – people no longer perceive the time spent waiting as wasted; instead, people use the time to their advantage and stop complaining. These are two perfectly valid approaches to framing the opportunity. Additional elevators might be a good solution, adding mirrors in the hall by the elevator door is a great solution.

You can see the difference by considering two different problem statements

The Problem of… Guests wait too long for the elevator
Affects Whom… All guests of our hotel on upper floors
The Impact of Which is… Our guests are less unlikely to return or recommend us in the future
The Benefits of a Solution are… Our guests are more likely to return and to recommend us to their friends

The Problem of… Guests are unhappy about waiting for the elevator
Affects Whom… All guests of our hotel on upper floors
The Impact of Which is… Our guests are less unlikely to return or recommend us in the future
The Benefits of a Solution are… Our guests are more likely to return and to recommend us to their friends

How you frame the problem, how you write the problem statement, will anchor your teams in a way of thinking about the situation and thereby narrow the field of exploration for possible solutions. Tversky and Kahneman developed the idea of anchoring bias in their research – we know that how you set it up when communicating is how people will interpret it. You are biasing explicitly when sharing clarity of purpose.

Perspective Taking

If Henry Ford had been an architect, we would have a quote about hotel owners demanding faster elevators. Many leaders of product teams I’ve met also focus on their version of a faster elevator. This is another consequence of taking an inside-out view of the problem. Perspective taking is the act of putting yourself into someone else’s shoes – and a necessary step in generating an outside-in view of the problem. The absence of this is why the vast majority of user-stories are poorly written (the focus of the linked article). When considering how product ops work within organizations, when accounting for anchoring effects, it becomes critical to acknowledge you are establishing the perspective everyone will share from that point forward.

When you are developing a problem statement you have the opportunity to improve your thinking. At this point, you can retain your initial inside-out perspective, or you can shift to your customer’s perspective. Making the shift will help leaders develop an informed point of view about what to include, exclude, and prioritize for the product. When people talk about customer-centricity within organizations, this is what they (should) mean – focusing on what matters to customers, and prioritizing investments to make a meaningful difference for those customers.

Wedell-Wedellsborg proposed a two-step shift which I found personally effective. Your first step is to imagine yourself in the situation of your customer. How would you see the situation from their point of view? Because of your own anchoring, you may still see the elevator as being too slow. You’ve got the curse of knowledge, you understand how things work and how they could work. Your second step, however, is to try and imagine how your customer sees it from their perspective.

Perspective taking may improve business outcomes not only by giving us access to more information than we would have without it, but also by ramping up activity in core brain regions involved in creative problem-solving and innovation.

Michael Platt, Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

Another bonus highlighted in the article – the more we exercise perspective-taking, the better we become at perspective-taking.

Perspective Seeking

Adam Grant reminds us to take things a step further – to genuinely do some research.

What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.

Adam Grant, Think Again

There’s always a catch – we cannot afford (in time or resources) to do all the research we want to do. So we have to be selective about it. I coach people to consider a good-better-best approach to practices when shaping how they approach creating products.

Bad – an inside-out assertion about an unacceptable situation – usually a problem manifestation.
Good – an outside-in imagining about how you would experience the situation to discover the underlying problem you want to solve.
Better – anchor in imagining the context in which someone finds themselves, and imagine how they would experience it, not how you would in their place.
Best – find and talk with people who do, will, or might experience the problem you imagine them experiencing.

As you progress along the continuum from bad to best, you are incurring additional costs, while also realizing additional benefits. Pragmatically, you can decide in your context where you should stop. This applies to customer research generally (a good better best hidden inside a best), and competitive analysis, prototype-evaluation, etc. Everything which potentially de-risks your product can be considered in this way.

I’ve said to executives before – you’re making tradeoffs between the risk of being late and the risk of being wrong. This isn’t quite a binary, although it makes for a great soundbite – “how late do you think?” shares the spotlight with “how likely to be wrong do you think?”

Conclusion

When writing problem statements, assuring you have an outside-in perspective comes without substantial incremental cost. If you don’t have people in your organization with these skills, then there will be a cost associated with improving your product management capabilities (and possibly changing your operations to incorporate problem statements). But once you’ve made that investment, the incremental cost is insubstantial. You can move all the way from “bad” to “better” across all of your product ops. Then you can selectively apply research where “best” is appropriate to de-risk your investments.