How To Identify Problems Worth Solving

On this episode I share: What is a 'Problem Worth Solving' How to identify problems worth solving Why validating the problem is so important The process to build to get these answers The questions to ask to validate your problem
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Episode TranscriptHey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a concept that I've mentioned on the show before that I refer to as identifying problems worth solving. Now, when I say problems worth solving, what I mean is looking for the best area of opportunity for which it makes sense for your organization to invest in a product solution. And if you found what I refer to is a problem worth solving, then it will make sense to make this investment, otherwise you might not be able to achieve the results that you're ultimately looking for. So why is it so important to find what I refer to as problems worth solving? Well, I'm going to start start by defining essentially what it is and to me it's something that is going to give you the kind of potential to achieve the product success that you're looking for. And it's so important to identify one before you start building solutions because if you haven't already done this, then your product solution or however you're trying to innovate is unlikely to offer to your clients, or whomever you're building that solution for the kind of value that you think it will. And it's instead probably not going to be very successful. There's a lot of that out in the product world. Many organizations that have invested in technology and software, especially from a customer perspective, have struggled to gain the kind of traction that they would like to because they underestimated this step in the process. So this is a really important element of figuring out how to get a product off the ground. So how do you identify a problem worth solving? Well, I've developed a process over a series of years of investing further and researching in pretty great detail, product strategy, product research, product management, all of these concepts. I've read all the books, and I've done a lot of the testing in building product companies of my own. That's how I know in terms of what I've done, what works and what doesn't work, so I can kind of shortcut the process for you and instead share my system that has worked pretty consistently as I've done this for other nonprofit organizations potentially like yours. And the first step of the process to identify who we're looking to help. You need to have a pretty specific, as I refer to it, target market in terms of who you want to interview. That's because different groups of people or different users are likely to have different problems. So the more consistent you can make that the better. And I'm going to share a mini example in this episode, but a more detailed, thorough example for how I followed this process to identify an area of opportunity for which we've built a successful product for a nonprofit client of mine that is helping them scale impact. In this case, let's assume you want to help your clients or clients that are the members of your nonprofit program. So if you have access to a number of them, that are interested in meeting with you, what you can do is you can interview them and invest in the part of the process that I refer to as customer discovery, which is a one on one conversation to better understand what a day in the life is like for them so that you can better understand their problems and challenges and look for areas of opportunity to potentially invest in a future product and help scale impact by solving some of their top problems and challenges. And that's the first step