What’s the Problem?
February 2021
Although the world is full of mediocre products, great products come from a deep understanding of underlying customer needs. The knowledge that you gain from understanding these needs is called customer insight, and this is different from the stream of feature requests you have coming in. Although any feedback from customers is helpful, product and feature requests usually come in without much context. "Make a product with a touchscreen that runs apps". Hmmmm. Ok, I can make this:
Meet Chumby. The Chumby was released in May of 2008, and heralded by Wired Magazine as one of the top gadgets of that year. It is quite possibly the most over-hyped product that you've never heard of.
Technically, Chumby was a great product. A device with a powerful ARM processor, touch screen, integrated WiFi, speakers, USB and various sensors, all for $180 on its initial release. And remember, this is 2008. There were several technology enthusiasts who were very passionate about this product. And yet, how many of you that aren't tech geeks have ever heard of it? Chumby ceased hardware sales four years later and the company was shuttered.
The Customer Problem
What customer problem was this cute little device solving for us?
Successful, and in some cases disruptive products, all start with a deep understanding of the customer problem - a level so deep that sometimes the customer can't even articulate it. Let's step back 20 years and think about how we consumed music content. For those of us that grew up with cassette tapes, the Compact Disk was a godsend. No more broken tape, or sticking pencils into the cassette gears to wind back in tape that somehow became a tangled mess in your car stereo player. But most important, the ability of a CD to instantly skip to the next song without pressing fast-forward, stop, fast-forward, stop, play, rewind, stop, play. We thought we had it made. Problem solved, and we didn't think there could be anything else that would ever replace the CD. We never thought about how frustrating it was to carry around a stack of CDs from our house, to our car, or on vacations.
However, Steve Jobs thought about it, and asked the important question of 'why?'. By understanding a problem no one thought we had, following closely and in some cases driving technological change to make it possible, he and his team at Apple created the iPod. And just like that, we had 1000 songs in our pocket. Some thought he was crazy. Apple was a computer company. What did they make an MP3 player? When you go back and look at the initial Apple fan response after the announcement, some apparently didn't grasp it right away, but the iPod completely changed how we consumed music and became one of the most impactful products of the 21st century.
Chumby, on the other hand, was a capable product from a technology perspective. And it did appeal to hobbyists and technical enthusiasts as a programmable and internet connected touchscreen. But the original iPhone launched in 2007, followed soon by the app store in mid-2008. Sometimes timing is just not on your side, but still, how was our good friend Chumby truly making lives better on a large scale?
Great products solve big problems, everyday problems, problems that are ubiquitous, and sometimes problems that we don't even think we have until we're presented with a novel solution.
Product Management = Problem Finding
Great Product Managers are great Problem Finders. They don't just read feature requests and listen to customers explain what they want to see in your product line. They dig deeper, they ask the why question five times to get to the underlying need and understand what the customer is really trying to accomplish, and more importantly, why they are trying to accomplish it.
Great Product Managers are great observers. They observe the world around them, and the world around their customers. They are sensitive to friction, anything in their customer's life that adds complexity even if the customer doesn't see it. They are curious to understand why people are just ok with the status quo, and are passionate to deliver a better alternative. In doing so, they pick up on underlying problems, and using design thinking, they prototype, experiment and iterate with their empathy for the customer driving them.
As the Product Manager deepens her understanding of the problem, she then begins mapping solutions that align to the organization's competencies and strategy. In the technology space, she also stays on top of technology trends and new technologies coming to market that will enable new, cost-effective ways to solve problems. She never assumes that her development team is constantly monitoring technology updates, and she has the unique perspective of the customer problem that helps her filter through the noise.
Timing is everything, and a great Product Manager will continually look for the intersection in time of a great problem to solve, the organization's capabilities to act quickly, and enabling technology that will speed time to market and perhaps provide first-mover advantage for an extended period of time.
Perhaps it is time to change the title of the Product Manager to Problem Finder, perhaps not, but finding big problems to solve and coming up with creative ways to solve them with technology has got to be at the top of the priority list as this is where true innovation lives.
So, go solve some big problems that no one is thinking about, and make iPods, not Chumbys (no offense Chumby).
