There are these three ideas that are coming together for me right now.
We’ve talked about the importance of novel intersections before – how as you explore different areas, texts, content, relationships, you find places where they approach the same problem in different ways, or you find a similar perspective being represented in unexpected ways across industries.
One of the best ways to drive innovation is to get out of the office, and we need to follow that same pattern when it comes to our information and research diets. We have to get out of the standard operating procedure sometimes, and cast a wide net, find other things that are interesting and engaging outside of our professional day-to-day.
(I think this is why we see such a strong correlation between arts and crafts and winning the Nobel!)
When I joined Disney, I read Bob Iger’s book. In this book there are a number of useful take-aways (although it is a pretty classic business guy book), but one rang out to me and has been hanging around my mind since:
“My former boss Dan Burke once handed me a note that said: “Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil. You may become the greatest trombone-oil manufacturer in the world, but in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year!” ”
Iger in Ride of a Lifetime
It was a little later that I first read the (now classic) Shreyas Doshi piece on the importance of not only identifying customer problems but also seeking to understand how those problems relate to one another.
After you’ve talked to a customer about a specific problem & possible solutions you could build, ask them to stack rank the problem being discussed vs. the other problems they are trying to solve for their business & org. This is where the real truth will emerge.
Shreyas Doshi
And there was the time that ol’ Brian Chesky scared me into learning about product marketing, which brought me to the very smart, very thoughtful, very valuable podcast and books of April Dunford (which I have recommended before and will recommend again!)
One of my biggest takeaways from Dunford’s Obviously Awesome (which was my Work Book of 2023 by the way!) was the importance of framing a product or solution within the broader context of your target customers or market – and being sensitive to the dynamic and shifting nature not just of your own product being developed, but also how the market itself can shift away from established successful frames.
(I know classically we think about positioning as a skillset for product folks working with external customers, but I’ve started using Dunford’s positioning framework with internal platform teams, and it’s been really valuable!)
These are three ideas that are in the same neighborhood, which is of special interest to product folks, which is the area of Problem Assessment. The most important thing a healthy product organization does is ensure that they don’t build the wrong thing, and it’s easy to hyper focus on a solution, on a product, and lose sight of what problems that real people have, that you can help them to solve.
It feels like every team I talk with, someone has a story about working for months on a project, crunching to hit a deadline, and then seeing the delivered product fail to achieve any interest from the market. We want to avoid this!
When we chat with our customers, when we observe the platform landscape of our companies, there will always be things to improve, areas where we might deploy our resources and time. It’s important that we take the above lessons and leverage them to help consider problems from a few different perspective:
- “Is this trombone oil?” (Assess business opportunity)
- We want to consider, if we absolutely defeat the problem, if we build out the absolutely best possible solution and become the dominant player in that market, will that be … a big deal? Would it move the needle for our firm?
- “How does this rank against other problems? (Assess customer pain)
- When we talk to our customers, do they consistently report that the problem at hand is more important, more urgent, or more painful than the broad landscape of other problems they have?
- “Can we appropriately frame this problem?” (Assess market understanding)
- Even if your firm has the product/engineering talent to build out an exceptional solution to a serious problem, do you know enough about your target market to bring the solution to them in a way that will communicate the value in terms and ways that resonate with that market?
Like any discovery exercise, this assessment can go as deep as you can sensibly prioritize: of course, the framing piece can be improved by learning more about a market and audience, the customer rank piece might be dynamic based on who your target customer is, and even the market sizing piece might change given other larger shifts in the macroeconomic landscape (think about the market for AI Assistants only two years ago!)
They also relate to one another: you wouldn’t want to invest a great deal in learning about the appropriate framing for a customer segment if you aren’t yet sure you have a solution to their most painful problems – and ensuring with relative confidence that you have a significant addressable market probably should come before the other assessments.
I hope bringing these different pieces together this can be a helpful lens in considering the different problems that you might work against: if we can avoid trombone oil, and build things that create real value, and solve real problems, that’s a great start!
Simon Ouderkirk 