Connecting the Problem Space and Your Product Strategy - with Dan Olsen
Connecting the Problem Space and Your Product Strategy - with Dan Olsen
Simple and powerful tools to understand opportunities and choose your differentiation
Hey! Nacho here. I’m continuing the podcast episodes where I interview thought leaders about hard strategy topics. In past weeks, we released conversations with Teresa Torres, John Cutler, Jeff Gothelf, and Marty Cagan. In upcoming episodes, we will feature Bruce McCarthy, Martin Eriksson, and more!
So, if you are not a subscriber yet, this is a great time to join :)
We all know Strategy is complex, cumbersome, and foggy. We strive to navigate and make strategic decisions in this environment, which usually leads to opinionated battles and stakeholder misalignment since we can all interpret the signals in different ways.
Remarkably, Dan Olsen, my guest in this episode, created simple tools and one-pagers that help you crystalize your thinking, find the opportunities that can truly make a difference, and have more meaningful conversations with stakeholders.
I’m amazed by how Dan brought complex situations down to their essence and explained how framing and structuring them can truly make these daunting challenges approachable and almost easy to resolve.
Important note: In a few moments, Dan shared a screen, so if you can watch while you listen, it could be helpful to get a visual reference (but it is not required to understand the concepts discussed).
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
Takeaways
Dan started highlighting the importance of this topic: most initiatives (or products, or startups, or strategies) fail because we get excited about the solution and don’t think more about how big and painful the problem is.
When mapping the problem space, Dan splits the exercise in two:
First, generate a list of all the problems/benefits you can potentially tackle.
Later, refine the problem space: group in similar buckets of value.
The two typical ways to expand are either focusing on adjacent problems of the same audience or the same problem for a new audience with particular unsolved needs in our current solution.
Dan shares his importance vs. satisfaction method for scoring the top opportunities. To build differentiation, you want to find problems of high importance but low satisfaction.
Dan has an interesting approach to going through opinionated discussions of importance: trying to build consensus. In a workshop, if a stakeholder has a pet project that everyone rates “low,” they will create at least some self-awareness, and you don’t need to be the one saying no.
BUT! With that internal consensus, you go outside the building and start validating with customers. Dan keeps it simple, trying to confirm with a simple scale where interviewees place themselves in the importance over satisfaction scores. We are not looking for statistical significance but rather for directional validation.
Dan connects this validation of the problem space to strategy by asking: “How are we going to be better than our competition?”. He suggests the Kano model and a simple one-page chart comparing the critical must-haves, performance, and delighter benefits versus competitors to understand how you differentiate.
This is the reason why David can beat Goliath: identifying a particular segment for which many benefits are not so critical (so you can perform lower than incumbents), but some other trait is underserved, and you can focus on outperforming established products.
We end up discussing alignment and how these simple one-page tools can visualize and clarify disagreements, so we can narrow the discussion and propose either new strategies with a clear framing or more validation to continue the decision-making process.
Resources
Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey A. Moore
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
You can see a list of all episodes to date here.