Below Water Level

It is suprising how different cultures, traditions and disciplines use very different words to talk about the concept of “Problem”. A problem is particularly relevant for Product because success or failure of everything that takes place downstream in the development and GTM lifecycle is determined by how well or badly was the problem defined.

Among the many different traditions that exist for explaining the concept of a “Problem”, here are a few lenses that I have found useful over the years.

The Gap

The Toyota Production System uses the word “Gap” to explain the difference between the “Current Condition”, i.e. where we are today, and the “Future State” or the “Target Condition”. The terms Current Condition and Target Condition may under different circumstances be defined as KPIs or goals that need to be accomplished. In this context, a “gap” explains the obstacles or struggles that are in the way of reaching the target condition. A gap is supposed to be a root-cause that lies behind the symptoms that are easily visible. An excellent book on the topic of problem definition in TPS is Managing to Learn by John Shook.

The Tension

In the book Holacracy, Brian Robertson explains “Tension” as a “perception of a specific gap between current reality and a sensed potential.” He uses the word “Tension” to describe the feeling when there is a “dissonance” between “how things are” and “how they should be”.

The Value Proposition

As Marty Cagan outlines in his article on Opportunity Assessment. The first question that product teams need to answer is, What problem does the feature solve?. This question is about the value proposition of your product or feature.

The Presenting Dilemma

In the excellent book, Quiet Leadership by David Rock, the term “Presenting dilemma” is used to describe the challenge that is going on in someone’s mind. This, however, is almost never the central problem that people face. To help arrive at the real problem needs making further connections. That is the process of root causing.

The Presenting Issue

In the context of conflict resolution techniques, John Paul Lederach writes in his article on Conflict Transformation: “Presenting issues connect the present with the past. The patterns of how things have been in the past provide a context in which the issues in a dispute rise toward the surface. But while they create an opportunity to remember and recognize, presenting issues do not have the power to change what has already transpired. The potential for change lies in our ability to recognize, understand, and redress what has happened, and create new structures and ways of interacting in the future.”

The Friction

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian General and Military Theorist, writing in his book On War explained friction as that which distinguishes real War from War on paper. Friction includes all the factors that create obstacles, unpredictability and messiness in execution of a plan that exists on paper.

From a business perspective, leadership and strategy author Stephen Bungay provides an excellent treatment of Friction in his book The Art of Action.

Essence of the Problem

In all the diverse flavours above, in defining what a problem is supposed to mean, each of the different schools try to encapsulate at least the following:

• an articulation of the Situation
• the description of the Struggle
• followed finally by a specific, crisp root cause or obstacle that needs to be overcome.

Following this template sets up Product teams for all sorts of downstream benefits in the software development lifecycle.