Why Problem Solving is the Most Critical Skill for 2025 - Part 2
Find new avenues by solving problems for your customer.
Yesterday I spent $50 on a water bottle.
It was this water bottle.
Even though that is a crazy amount for a water bottle I have no regrets. Why? Because it solves a problem for me.
Actually, it solves multiple problems- I wanted something that fits in my bag, has a straw lid, won’t leak, easy to clean, reusable, sustainable and most importantly, looks nice.
Frank Green didn’t start by designing my perfect water bottle but it ended up there by solving problems for their customers.
The first product they offered was the reusable coffee cup.
You know the one.
The founder, Benjamin Young, focused on the problems that disposable coffee cups were causing - they cost cafes money, created pollution and aren’t particularly great for the coffee drinking experience.
But the disposable coffee cup did offer convenience, so the alternative needed to either be just as convenient or counter this convenience with other more influential features.
Creating the perfect solution doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a deliberate tweaking of the product in response to what you can hear and observe from your customers.
As Young puts it: “When we were designing the first Frank Green reusable coffee cup, I put together this 100-point checklist of every box I thought consumers wanted ticked,”
The company has since sold over $100M in product.
Now Frank Green doesn’t necessarily come from humble beginnings - the original investment for that first product was about $3M - but the philosophy of solving problems for your customers to find a killer product holds true at any scale.
A problem represents an existing gap in the market.
If you can reframe problems as opportunities, you gain the confidence to compete in any environment. If you aren’t afraid of problems, but instead feel confident to engage them with curiosity, you’re able to identify gaps in the market that are already there.
These small gaps are the key to creating a differentiated product.
Recently, at the Atlassian Team on Tour conference, Andrea Clarke spoke about ‘engaging with the triggers of change’. Instead of burying your head in the sand, or coming up with a strategy to defend your business from a changing market, engage with what the market is telling you it wants!
Now, this can make you feel like you are trying to keep across every new development which sounds exhausting (and probably not so productive). Does your hairdressing salon now need AI?! Probably not.
The antidote to overwhelm is focus and what should you focus on? The problem itself.
For example, the original Beauty Blender is a makeup product that was invented by Rea Ann Silva. Silva was a makeup artist working on movie sets. When an actor needed a touch up, the make up artist would need to pull the talent off set to use an airbrush to reset the look. This was disruptive and time consuming. The Beauty Blender was invented to provide airbrush quality touch ups quickly and easily.
If you are a boy, this is a beauty blender - it’s a sponge for applying makeup.
You can only come up with a product like this if you are obsessed with the problem. If you’re deeply engaged with how that problem manifests, who is effected by it and what are the elements that make it work or fail.
Silva experimented with different sponge densities and shapes, trialing them on her clients to see what combination of factors produced the best result. Originally she only sold the blenders to other professional makeup artists: a niche of customers who shared the same challenges she was facing.
By engaging with the problem, interrogating its factors, experimenting, and testing, Silva was able to create a product with value for her community (and herself!). Falling in love with the problem, not being scared or avoidant of it.
Getting to the heart of the problem
Now you might be thinking, how do I find the problem? I talk to my customers all the time and they always give me amazing feedback but then they disappear. Let’s talk about validating feedback.
When I was a grad I worked for a large market research company. This company ran research for the state’s public transport department and we would run surveys and focus groups to understand how people were using the public transport system.
This was important because if you are designing way-finding and maps for an entire city, you need to ensure they are easy to understand for people with disabilities or who speak different languages and cover all of the population factors.
So the focus groups were really focused on how people were understanding and interpreting the signage - valuable feedback which would be incorporated into the eventual design.
But there was one question that was invariably asked that I always found amusing: On a scale from 1 to 10 how much do you enjoy using public transport?
Besides some outliers such as train fanatics and people who have had a recent horrible experience, most people were firmly in the 4-6 “meh” category. Now at a population level, it’s probably useful to know exactly how “meh” people feel about the public transport system.
But it doesn’t tell you anything. Aggregated at that level, you can’t identify any trends or patterns- what makes a bus trip more or less meh?
However what does tell you something is usage data. How are people actually using the public transport system.
This is more useful because it gives you observable data of how people actually act - not just how they say they act. It also gives you insight into how you can improve the experience. Increasing services in peak times, decreasing fares in off peak times to smooth the demand - these are data driven initiatives.
Another example of this gap between what people say and what they do is Facebook. Back in 2006, Facebook launched ‘the feed’, where the home page became a news feed of your friend’s recent updates. Within a week of the launch Facebook had received 30,000 emails complaining about the new feature.
But the data showed another story - users could not get enough. Time spent scrolling the feed was through the roof, with users doubling or tripling their time on the platform.
Note: This was some foreshadowing for a company that would go on to profit hugely from ignoring what customers “wanted” and feeding them more of what they wanted. But it does illustrate the value of validating your qualitative feedback with quantitive data.
What people say, doesn’t always reflect their behaviour, being able understand the relationship between the sentiment (qualitative feedback) and the data (quantitative feedback) is so valuable for creating solutions that will address a problem at it’s root.
It’s like that famous Henry Ford quote; “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” (although he never actually said that). It’s about getting to the root of why customers want something, rather than what they want.
So how do I do that?
Solving problems for your customers is essential to growing, evolving and staying on top of the market. But how do you approach these problems? How do you engage with them without getting overwhelmed or feeling lost?
You need a problem solving framework.
A framework guides you through identifying the problem, uncovering its root cause (i.e. getting to the bottom of the real problem), and implementing solutions in an impactful way. It helps you navigate both qualitative and quantitative data so you can scope problems with accuracy and intentionality.
This is exactly why I've developed Problem Solving 101 - a framework designed for emerging businesses. It provides enough information to be empowering and practical without feeling overwhelming or too theoretical. We dive into practical ways you can uncover these insights, and don’t worry, I’ve only included the bare minimum amount of maths.
Find your $50 water bottle product in 2025
If this kind of problem solving sounds like something you will need to prioritise in 2025, I’m running my Problem Solving 101 workshop in March. I’ll teach you how to identify problems, how to develop effective and sustainable solutions and implement them smoothly.
If you would like to learn a bit more about Problem Solving before you dive in, check out the introductory webinar.
Or learn more and register here:
The in-person course is just 680AUD and if you use the skills you learn to find your version of the beauty blender, the return will absolutely be worth the investment.
You’ll also learn how to solve internal problems (see part 1) and take control of large systemic problems (part 3, coming soon).
