Quantifying the impact of your problems puts them in perspective. It also exposes the assumptions you’re making, creating a virtuous cycle helping you to improve your framing of the problems, and making it possible to prioritize among them.
Product Management / Product Ops
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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 […]
Product Management / Product Ops
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Problem Statements Solve for SomeWhen
There is more to identifying who’s problem you’re trying to solve – you need to also have a sense for the context in which they experience the problem. Problem statements solve for someone, and good problem statements also solve for somewhen.
Product Management / Product Strategy
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Problem Statements Solve for Someone
There’s a difference between who is exposed to a situation (many people) and who experiences that situation as a meaningful problem they would like to solve (a select few). It is important to not describe a situation as self-evidently bad, but rather to reshape your framing to discuss the problem […]
Product Management
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Defining the Problems
In my previous article, I shared an improved template for writing problem statements. Knowing a good structure is necessary, but you also need to avoid filling the good template with bad content.
Product Management / Product Ops
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Problem Statements Provide Purpose
Every company competes in a dynamic market. Staying the course is drifting off course. When you don’t use problem statements to express your intent, there are no signals to help your organization stay on course. Your people lack clarity, and therefore make mistakes.
Product Management / Product Strategy
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Problem Statements Shape Better Products
The overwhelming emphasis I see in product organizations is on sequencing the execution of the product strategy over the upcoming quarters. Optimizing the product operations work to deliver a subpar product. There is little to no effort applied to shaping the product strategy. Problem statements should be used to shape […]
Product Management / Product Strategy
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Writing Problem Statements Improves Product Thinking
Most of the teams I’ve helped either didn’t use problem statements, or didn’t use them well. Without improving, they spend more time and money than needed to build things, and much of what they build is worthless or wasted.
Agile / Product Management / User Stories
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How To Make Your Product Special
When evaluating a product, a customer may see the product as special, adequate, inadequate, or awful. What is uncomfortable for product teams is they have no control over how the customer sees the product. They only have influence. What teams need to learn is how to approach creating the product […]