Problems are at the centre of everything product managers do
â¤´ď¸ This is one of the first things every PM will learn at the beginning of their career.
This mindset is taught in almost every classic PM literature. A few examples:
It is my strong belief, and the central concept driving this book, that behind every great product there is someone - usually someone behind the scenes, working tirelessly - who led the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that met the needs of the business.
The first sentence in Inspired by Marty Cagan
Running a lean startup is all about "Minimizing waste and maximizing the creation of value by staying closely aligned with what customers actually want and need.â
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
You need to âfall in love with the problemâ that youâre solving. This is the biggest driver of startup success. It will help you deliver value to users, tell a more inspiring story about your company, and recruit a team. âFalling in loveâ means feeling enough passion about the problem that it can drive you to persist through hard times.
Fall in love with the Problem, Not the Solution by Uri Levine
However, we also know that product management in reality is usually different from what is taught in books. Organizations are made up of people and people make processes messy and often not as easy to control as they are taught in books. In this article I tried to dive into one of the examples, where real life is different compared to literature. The example that we touch on here is, that in reality, not all successful product work starts with a problem.
Recent examples of (very) successful features that don't revolve around problems
* ChatGPT (Valuated at 128% billion $)
* ChatGPT + Canva integration (5M+ conversations)
* Spotify Wrapped (Cultural event, Reached 156 million users in 2022)
* NotebookLM (80,000 organizations are currently using NotebookLM)
You might be thinking now These products solve problems!
But let me explain.
If you as a PM had to write a PRD for these features today, you would have a hard time writing down a problem statement. Especially not one that you could validate. PMs in these companies didnât find any problems in data from their user base, that would have validated building these features. It would also be difficult to find any general problem statement that would be solved by these features. ChatGPT, for example, solves so many different problems that we don't yet know what else it will solve. Or Spotify Wrapped is a pure entertainment product, which is not known to solve any problems, but still had to be built by a product team.
That got me thinking.
Does the obsession with customer problems hinder innovation?
Product work without a problem to solve
I went in search of other features that are similar to those listed above. Impactful, but not problem-solving. Based on this, I have drawn up the following classification:
Strategic Growth
The first category is strategic growth, usually to grow ARR substantially by reaching new audiences or expanding into new markets.
Market Expansion
These features expand your portfolio of features. Mostly through vertical integration. This means that you build a new range of features that in some way fits in with your current main range of features. You open up new adjacent markets. Of all the features listed here, this is perhaps the one that is closest to solving problems. But still, very often you wonât find the problems youâre solving in your current user base. And itâs still often a very risky type of feature as it usually comes with high effort. Often you might be solving problems from a different company. Or you solve a problem, that has been solved 100 times before already, but you want to do it for the 101st time for strategic reasons.
Melissa Perry describes an example from a fictional company called Marquetly in her book âEscaping the build trapâ. The company is building a marketplace for educational courses. When surveying teachers (one side of the marketplace), the company found that teachers needed better video editing features to upload more content. The amount of content uploaded was one of the company's strategic KPIs. While developing video editing features is outside of Marquetly's core business (Education marketplace), it solves a problem that its own customers have. This would be an example of vertical integration, where you solve problems for your own customers.
However, there are also other examples of companies solving other companies' customer problems. Spotify's entry into the podcast sector would be an example of this. I'm sure it wasn't a problem for Spotify users that they couldn't listen to podcasts. When Spotify entered the market, the podcast market was much smaller than it is today and most of their users probably didn't have this form of content on their radar. Spotify, however, saw it as an opportunity to leverage their existing strengths (e.g. a great audio discovery experience) to expand their market by offering podcasts as well. This is an example, where Spotify solved a customer problem from a different company. A problem statement could read as something like I am not able to find great podcast content on my mobile phone.
Another example would be the takeover of cron Calendar by Notion and the renaming to Notion Calendar. Notion Calendar does not have superior functionality compared to Google Calendar or any other calendar. There was no problem with Notion users not being able to manage their appointments. They simply managed them in another calendar. Notion made the acquisition anyway because it fits with their vision of building a centralized operating system for corporate information. Notion believes that the information from Calendars is important for this.
Visibility Partnerships
Visibility partnerships help you to increase your reach. You do this by listing your application in a directory of another application with a higher reach. Sometimes integrations create synergies and solves problems. An example of this would be the integration of Crunchbase and LinkedIn. It's handy that LinkedIn users can now see reviews and funding rounds directly in LinkedIn. This solves the problem of not having to navigate to another site. It's a weak problem, but it can be articulated.
An example of an integration that does not solve any problem is the Canva plugin in ChatGPT. There are countless reviews (e.g. here or here) that the plugin is completely unusable. It also has a bad rating in the ChatGPT store (3.1). About a third of all reviews (>100k in total) are 1/5 stars.
But: This is still a very successful feature. Not because it solves a problem, but because it creates reach and awareness. It also positions Canva as an innovative company right on the frontier of AI. In the ChatGPT plugin store itâs visible, that more than 5 million conversations have been triggered to date! Apart from the dev costs, which seemed to be kept low on purpose, that's un-paid reach for Canva! Canva's main goal with this plugin was to reach more people for free and position itself as an innovative company.
The main objective of increasing reach is also reflected in the quality of the product. Canva is usually known for high quality features. The ChatGPT plugin is simple. Probably too simple. So simple that users don't find it useful. An indication that functionality was not the main goal to be achieved here.
Brand Positioning
The second category is Brand Positioning. This includes initiatives like rebrands or viral campaigns. They can e.g. enhance a productâs cultural relevance or generally strengthen its market presence.
Virality Drivers & Demo Features
Virality drivers have nothing to do with solving a problem. It's all about delighting customers. And this delight must be big. Very big. Virality drivers work by offering a (usually) fun feature that blows people away so that they share it on social media.
A good and recent example of this is Spotify Wrapped. Letting you know how many minutes you listened to an artist or what your musical era was called in May is not a solution to a problem. But it is fun! It gets you to share the stats on social media, and that's free reach for Spotify.
In the podcast, Stefan and I also discussed the equivalent for this in the B2B SaaS space, which would be âDemo Featuresâ. Demo Features have the only purpose to impress during a demo . These features can add a "wow" factor, making the product memorable and helping it stand out in competitive pitches.
Brand Refreshes
Most PMs have had this experience, and it's always a challenge to prioritize this work over other product work that solves customer problems: Rebrandings. Rebrandings solve 0 customer problems. The only reason companies are doing it is for themselves. To position themselves better. For better long-term market positioning, but also to attract better & retain better talent. The majority of work is usually done in the design or marketing team. But there are often parts that need to be delivered by the product team. Changing colors, fonts, padding, logos etc. It's just work that needs to be done.
The key is to keep the effort as low as possible. Ideally, you have a design system that allows these changes to be made centrally without distracting the engineers from their actual work.
Experience Optimisation
Category #3 are improvements in performance or delightful interactions that elevate user satisfaction and loyalty, even without solving explicit problems.
Performance Upgrades
Performance upgrades improve loading times. It may come as a surprise to many that this type of feature is listed here. However, the truth is that performance improvements, such as faster load times, are usually not a solution to a customer problem. Unless there is one of the following three reasons:
* Your app is actively perceived as slow by users.
* Speed is a key value proposition of your application (e.g. Cloudflare or AWS)
* You are competing with distractions and attention. This is true for B2C e-commerce websites, for example, where milliseconds matter to convert customers.
As a B2B SaaS PM you should look for real impact in your work. That means influencing business metrics, such as revenue, retention or customer satisfaction. A performance upgrade will only influence these business metrics if one of the above points are true. Incremental performance improvements are rarely noticed by users. So, be careful when prioritizing performance improvements over delivering real customer value.
UX Delighters
This type of feature is about incorporating playful elements such as micro-interactions to increase enjoyment. They are usually aimed at creating emotional connections rather than solving actual problems. A good example is the Apple Intelligence Suite. Apple is known for playful micro-interactions on the iPhone, but the latest version has taken these to a new level. You can see them all in action via this link: https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/.
B2B SaaS companies are traditionally more focussed on efficiency and functionality. But some of them also manage to inspire with their UX. I was recently blown away by the Sidekicks AI function from Miro.
You can get AI-generated feedback from a domain expert on your content. UI-wise a cursor will move through your canvas, imitating a real person reading through content, dropping comments. Below is an example for a board i created for writing this article:
While this experience doesnât solve a real problem compared to simply adding the comments without the animation, itâs delightful and made the experience memorable for me.
Thereâs also micro interactions that solve real customer problems. @Nesrine Changuel has some great examples in a recent blogpost:
While delight doesnât solve a problem, it often enhances user retention and emotional connection. For specific features it can be also a strategic element that is important for the features success. Itâs important though that you find a good balance of not prioritizing them over solving real customer problems.
Foundational Innovation
The last category is Foundational Innovation.
By definition, enabling technologies are designed to enable advances and applications in a wide range of problem areas. Examples of enabling technologies include large language models such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 as well as historical innovations such as the steam engine, the printing press and the internet. Although scientists do not intentionally avoid certain problems, the development of enabling technologies often involves an open-ended approach.
Companies working on such open problems usually operate under very different financial conditions than traditional SaaS companies. The main objective is not to develop a product and therefore not to solve a specific problem. Only very few commercially-focused organizations can afford to invest in such initiatives. A good example is Google, which have a long-lasting culture of open-ended innovations. A recent example that came out of it and was turned into a product was NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a content-repurposing tool. The most popular usecase is to create a podcast from text-documents. This is not a problem any Google user had. Itâs still an incredible innovation, which might be turned into itâs own revenue-generating product soon.
The bottomline - How do we build products without a problem?
If the majority of your work as a PM is not based on solving problems, you are doing something wrong. Solving problems is still at the centre of product managers' work. But after reading this article, you will have seen that there can also be investments that are not centered around solving a problem. However, these are not usual day-to-day cases for PMs. If youâre a PM in a B2B SaaS company with common financial principles, solving real-life problem is still your best shot to making your organization successful.
A clear âWhyâ
Even if the features listed above are not based on a problem, there is still a clear why? behind them. In all of the examples listed, it is obvious why the companies have done them and how they contribute to parts of their strategy.
You canât bypass the Why? part behind a feature.
Having a clear problem to solve for your feature has many advantages. It forces you to think user-centric. Features that solve a problem have strong product-market fit in-built. Working on features, that donât solve a problem have a higher likelihood of failing. And failing is expensive.
So, whenever you work on a feature that is not connected to solving a problem, make sure you have a crystal-clear why attached to it.
The best way to de-risk features without a problem is to ask the following question to 5 different people working on the feature. Ideally from different teams, such as PMM, UX, Engineering, etc.
Why do we, as an organization, need this feature?
If you donât get the same answer 5 times, you can assume it will be risky to work on the feature.
Podcast Chapters
00:00 The Centrality of Problem Solving in Product Management
02:31 Exploring Foundational Innovations and Their Impact
10:05 The Role of Product Managers in Foundational Technologies
15:46 Strategic Growth: Market Expansion and Visibility Partnerships
23:53 Navigating Risks in Market Expansion and Partnerships
24:19 Startups vs Established Companies: Distribution Challenges
25:54 Brand Positioning: Virality Drivers and Rebranding
26:44 Demo Features: The B2B Perspective
32:06 Experience Optimization: Performance Upgrades vs UX Delighters
34:00 The Value of Rebranding in B2B SaaS
35:44 Prioritizing Performance Upgrades: When and Why?
38:12 Delighting Users: The Role of UX in B2B Products
43:15 The Importance of a Clear 'Why' Behind Features
Links
Link to Podcast Episode
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In case you want to reach out, please do so on LinkedIn:
* â¤ď¸â𩹠Follow Hotfix: https://pal.bio/the-hotfix-podcast
* đď¸ Follow Christoph: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophbodenstein/
* đď¸ Follow Stefan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-pernek-629901107/
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