(2024-09-09) Maurya Find Better Problems Worth Solving With The Customer Forces Canvas

Find Better Problems Worth Solving with the Customer Forces Canvas. The search for Problem/Solution fit starts with creating a model - specifically a business model using a Lean Canvas. This is really an update to (2017-08-17) Maurya The Updated Problem Interview Script, and A New Canvas.

• but is really updated again at (2024-04-24) Maurya Back-story Behind Customer Forces Stories (LeanFoundry) with the 3-act Customer Forces Story Mad-lib.

You then get outside the building and attempt to validate/invalidate your assumptions using the meta-script below.

The only reliable way to gather this evidence is by exploring what customers did in the past or will do in the present.

If you don’t uncover evidence supporting your assumptions (invalidation), you have to dig deeper for new problems worth solving. This is where people stumble.

guessing at “real” problems at the outset is hard given our in-built bias for our solution

if you start with a non-problem, even though you can often see invalidation pretty quickly during the interview, recovering from it isn’t always easy. Limiting the problem context upfront limits your maneuverability, and it’s quite possible to leave the interview without any actionable problems to go after.

This is why I updated the Problem Interview script

First, let’s talk about what I took out.

I found the Problem Ranking step never led to any useful insights

Next, I refined the framing around early adopters and problems.

When searching for early adopters, the key question is not asking “who” but “when.” In other words, behavioral triggers or psychographics are much more actionable than demographics.

During the problem interview, where discovery is the goal, a better framing is around triggers and desired outcomes.
Triggers create a desire for better.

Something to note here is that while customers desire something better, they often don’t know how to measure and/or achieve better. But uncovering whatever their definition of better is will nonetheless be key to crafting your unique value proposition.

Triggers and desired outcomes create the consideration set your customers to use to search for alternatives and select solutions. That is what you explore next.

For each solution (starting with their most recent), you want to get the customer’s story on how they found, selected, used the solution and what’s the next goal for them

The answers to these questions are where you’ll find problems worth solving. I call this the backdoor approach to problem discovery because you don’t lead with problems but rather extract them from customer stories.

Here’s the updated Problem Interview script:

As you’ve probably noticed by now, the customer forces diagram (that I’ve also previously written about) not only helps you visualize the interview script but can also be used to document the results of your interview

That is why I rolled the visual into a new Customer Forces Canvas that you can download below and also use to document your results: