What are we doing here?

I kind of hate to kick things off by quoting a dead white man, but remember that one Einstein line, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it”?

Couldn’t agree more, Al. How many times have you chased down one route (or been pushed down it by your boss), maybe even implemented something pretty jazzy, only to realize you should’ve gone a completely different direction? How about the hours- or days-long in-depth excel analysis that doesn’t end up saying much? (Guilty!) You get excited about an idea, or are given a direction from some higher-up, and immediately get rolling.

While we can certainly re-direct in motion, and eventually end up where we should, we end up wasting so much time and energy running after things that in the end aren’t impactful. (Or, we get stuck complaining vaguely about things that hold the business or team back, and never getting traction on solutions).

Instead, we could avoid the wasted energy by asking a question to set us in the right direction from the start: What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Okay, so what does that really look like?

First, you can use “the five whys”, a framework you have probably seen before. It’s a helpful starting point, particularly as a quick mental reference for a live conversation.

Take this example: You’re in a weekly business performance review, and hear, “We didn’t hit our ecommerce target last week — what can we do to fix it?” The team all jumps in with ideas: “We need to work on site speed!” “We changed something in the checkout process last week that could be dissuading people from completing their order!” “We have the budget, what if we doubled our ad spend on Google?”

But what if someone asked, “Why didn’t we hit the target? What’s the real problem here?”

The team might then step back to see that, while traffic was steady week over week, conversion was down. Why? One particular page has an increase in share of traffic and very low conversion. Why? Well, a conversion-focused ad campaign launched last week that pointed to that landing page, but no one has ever looked to optimize the page for conversion.

We’re only three “whys” in, and already the problem has shifted toward, “how should we adjust traffic sources and optimize landing pages, to get conversion rate back to 3% and hit next week’s ecommerce sales goal?” A much clearer direction for more investigation and action.

A great follow-up question, by the way, is “how much does that problem matter?” Can we quantify the impact in dollars, hours, lives effected? How does that stack up against what we’re already working toward and prioritizing? Is it worth taking further action right now?

So you’re just asking “why” a bunch? That doesn’t seem very thoughtful…

“The 5 Whys” is a great mental tool to lean on in live conversations, for quick day-to-day issues that come up. But if I’m kicking off a new piece of work, particularly with a team, I go a step further. Cue the trusty ol’ Problem Statement Worksheet.

A decades-old relic from McKinsey, this is something I was given the first day of orientation and never imagined I’d still be using years later. It’s not magical (or a protected secret - just Google it, or have at my own simple template), but it’s a great tool for getting multiple folks on the same page and eliciting collective wisdom to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

I just recently went through this process while kicking off a new project. The conversation prompted others on the team to share two names of experts I wouldn’t have known to tap, and context related to the business’s history that I wasn’t previously aware of.

What does the Problem Statement Worksheet contain? There are 5 elements:

• Context: Has the organization tried anything to solve this problem before? Why do we care about it now? How does it fit into what else is going on in the business?

• Success criteria: What would it look like if we were successful in solving this? There’s the easy stuff like hitting a metric, but what else is involved? Is an important part of success that someone on another team has built the skills to maintain the tool you’re building, or that certain folks are 100% bought in on the solution?

• Scope and constraints: What’s in bounds / out of bounds? What kind of money, time, capacity are we working with? Are there restrictions on geography, channel? Other business priorities we should be sure to not conflict with?

• Stakeholders: Who cares? Who will need to be kept in the loop, and how?

• Key sources of insight: Who or what will help us figure this out? is there a dataset or an expert we can lean on?

It might seem like a bit much, but I promise it’s worth giving a shot. And once you’ve identified the real problem you’re trying to solve, you can get after it!

Happy problem defining,

Abby