How To Find Problems Actually Worth Solving

Gathering problems with all teams in OnTruck

I have worked at four different places as a Product Manager during the last five years:

• In a fast-growing B2C startup: La Nevera Roja
• In a big B2C startup operating in more than 40 countries: Foodpanda
• Inside a multinational: Telefónica
• And now in an even faster-growing B2B startup: OnTruck

In all these places, I have realized that solving problems is the best approach to achieve a good product. A feature-factory is the best recipe to develop a failed product. An idea-driven process neither helps. A product manager has to find the problems worth solving.

My best weapon to do so among all Stakeholders has been using Design Thinking and data. I have led from Design Sprints to Blueprint sessions, Customer Journeys or Map Tasks. Also, I have learned how to use Data analysis tools and working together with BI to get insights. In my approach, the PM owned all the problem-finding and prioritization. And it worked well. La Nevera Roja reached a big share of the market in Madrid and Barcelona. Its delivery service is delivering food in more than forty countries for Foodpanda. And the product I worked in Telefonica did an spinoff and is a successful startup in the insurtech scene.

When I joined OnTruck by the end of July, I tried to follow the same approach. You can summarize it in the typical sentence: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution. There were around 20 people among Operations, Sales, Finance, and Marketing. And we were two Product Managers — Javier Escribano, CPO, and me-.

Now, we are three PMs but more than 100 people in two countries and still growing.

There are teams of more than seven people in Tech, Product, Operations, and Business. There are a lot of stakeholders coming with superb ideas. And most of them struggle understanding why we need to analyze them before start working. The ideas were frustrating all the other teams and us.

How to stick to love-the-problem sentence caring about all stakeholders and users problems? We have outsourced part of our job.

We keep working on finding problems worth solving, but we are also helping the teams to do it by themselves. We have developed a tool that we call Problem Draft that all people, especially managers, can use.

A Problem Draft helps teams understanding the problems or opportunities they face. It moves people from thinking of solutions to thinking in problems. It also helps to discard ideas that are nice features to add but do not have a problem behind.

We aim the teams to follow some principles to complete it:

USER-CENTERED
Experience problems or opportunities through the user’s eyes.

PROCESS
The document is a sequence of steps from the more general to the more specific. Start by describing the problem and users affected, and end with the impact on the business.

CO-CREATIVE
All stakeholders that have a relation to the problem should take part in the process.

EVIDENCING
Providing qualitative or quantitative pieces of evidence is essential.

VISION
Think in what could be the expected success without describing a solution.

Here is our project draft as we use it:

Sponsor: Who supports this problem or opportunity?
Area: Scale or Growth
Product Manager: Product Manager working on it

1. DESCRIPTION
The first step in building something new is understanding what problem you want to solve or opportunity you would like to target, and for whom.
It should be crystal clear before you start thinking about any solutions.

• Who has this problem?
  A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people.
• Problem/Opportunity
  What you are trying to achieve should be easy to communicate in a sentence or two and resonate with someone from your target audience. If not, consider that a big red flag.

2. WHY NOW
Build a great product has cycles. Not all situations have to be solved on time. Maximize the product cycle solving things when are big enough but no too much big help us to scale healthy.

• How is the problem being solved now?
  If nobody is taking care of it right now, that is a red flag that you may have a bias or you are in love with a solution.
• Why is it a big problem or opportunity?
  Think about the size now, but also in 6 months and in 12 months.
• How do you currently measure it?
  It can be time invested in solving it right now, amount of money it costs or the stress it provokes in people affected.

3. PRIORITY
We do not have resources to solve all, which is a good thing because limits drive creativity and excellence. As a startup, we should focus on validating initiatives that have more impact and more unknowns first. Later, on solution phase, we can choose the faster way, the easier solution or the “quick win”.

• What is unknown about the problem?
  If a standard solution for this problem already exists, there is no unknown. If nobody is trying to solve this problem in the way we do, there is a big unknown.
• How much does it impact OnTruck business model?
  If OnTruck business model depends on targeting this problem or opportunity, the impact is maximum. If OnTruck continuity depends on how to target this, the impact is also maximum.

4. MEASURE SUCCESS
How we measure success is critical to the long-term results of our team because it is the thing that people rally around. Make sure to dedicate to this exercise the proper time and attention. Bear in mind that the solution can affect what to measure, so do follow up once the work on the solution starts.

• Choose just one KPI to focus.
  The KPIs are Margin, Growth or Quality of service. It help the team to align with your interests while building.
• Define what success look like before including the problem or opportunity in any roadmap.
  Otherwise, if you try to interpret solutions after they start coming in, confirmation bias will lead to a non-objective reading. If you have a funnel to discuss, this is the best approach.

5. SHARE
The many are smarter than the few. No matter how smart you are, the team together is smarter than you. Present to some colleagues your Draft as soon as you can and iterate among their challenges. If it is an internal problem, ask one person of the affected team to agree. Include people from different cities or even better, countries. Sometimes is better to share it directly with the affected people than with his manager.

Present this document at least to two partners and assure you that:
- They understand the problem or opportunity and can explain it.
- They agree with you that it is worth to target.
- They agree with you that now is the time to target it.
@name. Once shared, add the comments and check the box.
@name. Once shared, add the comments and check the box. check the box.

If you are presenting this Project Draft and someone asks “have you considered X?” and your answer is “No,” consider that a big red flag.

It is working pretty good by now.

For example, Finance asked about having an email to ask Carriers for billing data. When they completed a Draft, they realized that we had a problem with the carriers onboarding. Sometimes we are allowing drivers to work without asking their billing data.

Another example happened with Operations. The team came to us with the idea of having a long list with all orders no matter their status. Working on a Draft, we found that they need to assign jobs to Drivers that are doing another job.

We — PMs — help the teams to follow the Problem Draft process. Every time anybody shares with us an idea for the first time, we sit with her to fill a Draft. By doing one or two Drafts, everyone can do the next alone and share with us his problem in a faster and autonomous way.

We want people from different areas or countries sharing their thoughts. Thus, we included a step where stakeholders have to get feedback from two people. Sharing the Draft helps people rank among Drafts themselves. Sometimes it also moves the team to discard a problem, although it is not the usual yet.

Now, stakeholders are learning to think in problems better than solutions.

• They understand and describe their problems in a very replicable way.
• They share their thoughts and understand how they stick to the product vision.
• They compare problems among teams to rank them.

But they are analizing way more problems to solve than the time and people available! We have to figure out how to include them in the prioritization process as well.

In OnTruck we are glad if we can help the startup and product community with our learnings. If you have found this article useful and have learned something, share it so others can enjoy it too.

And let me know in the comments if you try to use our Problem Draft or about any other way to gather problems you are using!

We are hiring!

OnTruck is leading the disruption of the logistics sector in Europe.
We are looking for Product Managers and other positions in Engineering and Product.
Top investment funds in Europe -Atomico (UK), Idinvest (France), PointNine (Germany) and Samaipata (Spain)- have invested on us.
If you want to contribute to a better world and challenge yourself every day, let’s talk!