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The Equation Between Product Thinking and Problem Solving
The Equation Between Product Thinking and Problem Solving

December 15, 2021

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It is common knowledge that user experience is central to every product's successful launch and longevity. But how can you ensure that your product fulfills this demand satisfactorily?

Cue in product thinking.

At its core, product thinking aims to determine the product's usefulness for its users. However, while the feature-set of a product also contributes to that significantly, product thinking focuses on the product as a whole — addressing its usefulness to a specific type of user.

For instance, over the years, Instagram has evolved to include video calling, voice messaging, and all sorts of useful features to its product, but it remains a photo-sharing app at its heart. If you take this primary component away, all of the other aspects put together couldn’t save it from being abandoned by its user base.

Understanding what makes your product useful, that is, determining its chief function is essential. And there’s a tried and tested way to go about it — by identifying the key user problem the product aims to solve. 

And here’s where product thinking and problem solving intersect.

What Is The Relation Between Product Thinking and Problem Solving?

Regardless of how your product evolves in terms of features or appearance, it must respond to a core need of your customers to be useful, resolving a key problem. 

Product Thinking and Problem Solving

The problem space comprises the needs of the users and the solution space how the business responds to them. However, to create a product that can satisfy the users, the business must employ technology, making it the third entity of the product development process.

Problem Solving

In other words, the business must draw on technology to create a product that can solve the users' problems — and this process, reducing the gap between the business and the users through problem-solving, is called product thinking. This implies that problem-solving is not simply one integral element of the process of product thinking, but the very purpose it is initiated for.

Design thinking ProcessNow that we understand the correlation between product thinking and problem solving, let’s learn how to incorporate them into your processes to enhance user experience.

How Does Product Thinking Work?

Three key pillars of product thinking contribute to creating a product that solves your target audience’s problems. Let’s dive right in.  

problem solving

Observation

To start off right, it is crucial to clearly define the problem, even more so than the solution itself. This is because faulty solutions can be modified and rebuilt to work, unlike flawed problems that render all attempts at fixing them useless. To do this effectively, you must also have an unambiguous understanding of who your target audience is because the issues different demographic groups face can vary significantly and clubbing them together may limit your product’s reach.

Ali Rayl was part of the team that built a game called 'Glitch'. Even though the game ultimately failed, she observed a few things working on it:

  • Boring, time-consuming tasks (like breaking rocks) can be turned into fun activities
  • This technique can be used to make work tasks enjoyable

The result? She employed this to create the workplace communication tool Slack, enabling its unique mix of functionality and UX to garner 12 million daily users! Observe how people react to different products or even a lack of them to recognize the problem.

Ask Yourself:

  • What problem does my product solve?
  • Who are we solving it for?

Inquiry

This is how you apply your observation. You need to understand why people react the way they do. What motivates them? If you know the reason behind their negative reaction to your product, you can simply add features to your existing solution to rectify it.

In 2006, Mikkel Svane and Morten Primdahl were implementing old-school customer service solutions in businesses and they realized these were extremely complicated to set up and use. Enter Zendesk. They understood why the software in use was ineffective — poor and complex design — and offered an alternative that is very much like them, but simple and intuitive. Today, Zendesk is one of the most popular helpdesk software globally. 

Ask Yourself:

  • Why am I solving this problem?
  • What is my strategy to go about it?

Resolution

You know the problem. You know how to resolve it. All you need to do is create a feasible solution now. But it’s not that easy. Yik Yak, a messaging app that lets you chat with people in your vicinity anonymously, was launched in 2013 and enjoyed a good reception. The high school and college students it was targeting loved the anonymity, but the very same thing also encouraged some to engage in cyberbullying.

The app gained a bad reputation and schools began to block its use in their vicinity. To overcome this, Yik Yak removed the anonymity feature. This was the wrong way to resolve the issue because scrapping the one unique feature its user base loved immediately resulted in them abandoning the app. The solution you come up with must satisfy your target audience first and foremost.

Ask Yourself:

  • What is my end goal? 
  • Which features will facilitate achieving that?

Product Thinking = Problem Solving 

Product thinking allows you to tackle your challenges scientifically and create unique and viable solutions. By employing product thinking through observation, inquiry, and resolution, you can produce measurable, problem-solving results for your target audience in the form of the ideal product.


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Minakshi
Digital Marketing Executive

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