Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs

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I am excited to share with you the news that my book Fall In Love with the Problem, Not the Solution - A Handbook for Entrepreneurs will be launching this August in #Portuguese, making it accessible to all aspiring entrepreneurs in #Brazil! The Lean Canvas isn’t a better Business Model Canvas but a different canvas altogether. Even though I changed 4 boxes, the addition of the Problem box continues to generate the biggest mind shift in the resulting business model. Second, social entrepreneurs believe that the best solutions are bottom up – they bring those we serve into the solution.In your case, you have two customers – employers AND employees. What jobs do the people in your area want? What would get them to a living wage? What are the high vacancy jobs that employers cannot fill? Where is the best nexus between job demand and job supply?

Pitfall: Metrics can only tell you what’s going wrong, not why, and your team will have a “different good idea” for how to fix it. Is it really possible to solve a problem without defining it? In their paper Identifying Viable ‘Need-Solution Pairs’: Problem Solving Without Problem Formulation, MIT Professors Eric Von Hippel and Georg von Grogh demonstrate that, far from being uncommon, this is actually quite a common occurrence. The rolling suitcase, for instance, was invented when Bernard Sadow, struggling to carry his heavy luggage, observed an airport worker effortlessly rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled skid. In cases like this, the problem is identified and formulated (if at all) only after the discovery of a solution.

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By contrast, many marketing organizations follow a traditional “waterfall” approach to project management, in which workers operate in distinct groups divided by area of expertise. Each group hands the project off to the next in a strict, linear pattern, a process that can take months or even years. A better way to prioritize your customer feature requests is by first understanding the root problem that triggered the request in the first place. Where were they? What were they trying to do? Why? Pitfall: Most customer feature requests are framed as solutions, but customers are often not good solution designers. The book is easy to read and describes all aspects of building a product, or service, from how to define the problem that worth solving, fundraising, hiring and firing, startup rollercoaster journey, product market fit (PMF) and to growth and to the end of a startup (the exit). How would this translate in a development context? Take the case of two women empowerment programmes we have been involved with in emerging economies: in both cases, programme formulation based on traditional analytical approaches (problem definition based on context analysis, surveys, research) led both organisations to approaches that they recognised as ineffective and “stale”.

People fall in love with the solution because they want easy answers and seek magic bullets,” says Ed Greig, chief disruptor at Deloitte Digital UK. “Unfortunately, magic bullets don’t exist.” The first part of the journey, and perhaps the most important part, is figuring out product market feed, meaning the value it brings to users. Without this, your idea is dead in the water. No company skipped figuring out product market feed. “Once a company figures out product market feed they don’t change it.”

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Think of all the services that you use every day: searching Google, using WhatsApp, opening Waze, Uber, Netflix. Ask yourself: What is the difference between using any of those things today compared to the first time I used it? There is no difference. We are searching Google today the same way that we searched Google for the first time. We are using Uber today the same way, and we are using Waze today the same way. This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. I also suggest applying this practice to other aspects of your life. Ask yourself multiple times: Knowing what I know today, would I do something different? If so, then do something different right now. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. I was persistent, though. Anyone who knows me is aware that once I get an idea in my mind, it’s nearly impossible to dissuade me from pursuing it. Telmap had 50,000 users at the time, all in Israel, and all using their mobile phones with GPS. I built a theoretical statistical model to show how those 50,000 random drivers would be enough to create actionable traffic information. It was a very simple model that turned out to be accurate later when we built Waze. If you happen to find yourself in love with a particular idea, you can make that the first one you put through the Build-Measure-Learn loop. You’ll have several other ideas ready and waiting to be worked on if it turns out that solution you were pining after wasn’t Mr. Right after all. Resiliently and resolutely moving on to the next idea, when the one you were excited about didn’t work out, is another way of demonstrating your love for the problem. Step 3: Use the decision framework to fall in love with the right solution

Fall in love with the problem, not your solution.” It’s a maxim that I first heard spoken a few years ago by USAID’s former Chief Innovation Officer Ann Mei Chang. I’ve found myself frequently reflecting on those words as I’ve been thinking about the challenges of implementing public policy. I spent the past year on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. working as a legislative fellow, funded through a grant to bring scientists to improve evidence-based policymaking within the federal government. I spent much of the year trying to better understand how legislation and oversight work together in context of policy and politics. To learn what makes good public policy, I wanted to understand how to better implement it. Needless to say, I took a course in Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), a framework to manage risk in complex policy challenges by embracing experimentation and “learning through doing.”

Success!

This is critical to understand. All businesses in the world have their ups and downs, but the frequency of those when building a startup are dramatically higher. Perseverance is critical to success. “If this journey is going to be a journey of failures, then the faster you fail, the more you increase the likelihood of being successful.” If you listen to all your customers, pretty soon, you’ll have a bloated monster on your hands. Even if you listen to your most valuable customers, you might still build stuff that they don’t use. This is because most feature requests are framed as solutions, not problems. And customers are often not good at devising solutions — even to their problems. “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” The book also provides an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and my second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry giants. Uri Levine brings a vast entrepreneurial experience to the table. Thus, When Uri Levine gives you an advice, you want to read it. He shares valuable insights in this book on how to embrace the challenges and problems during the way of building a successful business.