Problem Finder vs Problem Solver
Problem Solving is essential, but Problem Finding is often the more important mindset to develop
What Problem Finding Means & Why It Should Be A Habit
Problem Finding is the art of thinking outside of your core responsibilities about what your business needs. You are not given these problems as a result of your given role and responsibilities, but rather you have to seek them out by researching your business and market as well as listening to others around you. It’s important that employees at a business aren’t ever in a state where they are ‘waiting for new opportunities’, with the onus here falling as much on the employee as it does on the company.
Tuck School of Business Professor Vijay Govindarajan writes in his article Stop Saying Big Companies Can’t Innovate that “past success can trap companies into believing what they have done is a blueprint for what they should do”. When this mentality passes down to individual team members, and individuals seek only to optimize on solved problems, greater issues and a lack of innovation can ensue. Companies should make Problem Finding as an ethos a habit.
My Introduction To Problem Finding, With Some Lessons Learned
It was the second week of my first ever internship. I was a rising sophomore at Dartmouth working on the BizOps team at Wildfire Interactive for the summer. The social media management software company was riding the social media wave with great success (later being acquired by Google), and while I was excited to be there, I had no idea what the hell ‘working at a tech company’ meant. My manager sat me down.
Here’s how I remember the conversation going, paraphrased of course:
Manager: “So what have you been up to?”
Me: “Oh, this and that” (ie bumbling around doing very little)
Manager: “To be honest, you’re not creating any value. This could be a problem.”
Me (panicked internally, and probably externally): “Give me a project and I’ll get it done. I’ll do whatever is needed.”
Manager: “We’re moving fast here- there’s no time for me to craft perfectly planned projects for you. There are plenty of problems we have to solve here- go find some. Come back to me with a few project ideas in the next few days.”
Me (in my head): “S*$%”
Sure, it would have been nice to have a bit more guidance, but damn if this hasn’t to this day been the best lesson in business I’ve learned yet.
It’s not enough to be a great Problem Solver- if you want to advance your company, you need to become a great Problem Finder.
I got to work. I started having coffee with members of the sales team to understand their needs. I met with members of the product team to understand any challenges they were dealing with. I ended up chatting with one of the co-founders about his biggest questions about the market. This led to some pretty dumb projects. I distinctly remember putting together a powerpoint ranking various social media management SaaS companies by how many Facebook Likes they had. My god was this useless in retrospect, but it was something nobody was working on that I thought might bring some value to the marketing team. I’m pretty sure I remember emailing it to one of the founders and receiving a reply of “Interesting!”. You get the point.
After a few blunders at finding problems to solve, I eventually stumbled upon a conversation with an account exec where I learned that the sales team was being inundated with questions about competitors. Stuff like “how do you stack up on these features compared to Company X” and “your product seems great, but Company Y says they do the same thing for half the price”. At the time, VCs were throwing cash every which was to social media management companies in order to ride the Facebook/Twitter wave that was just hitting businesses in the late 2000s/early 2010s. There were new competitors popping up weekly, and nobody knew who was who. I decided to become the guy who would know more about competitors than anyone else, and create tools for various teams to understand and sell against these new businesses.
So I found a problem. I ended up spending a good chunk of the summer and the following year researching competitors, compiling detailed comparative reports, teaching new hire classes about the market, and ultimately presenting to leadership on a regular basis remotely from school and on-site about changes in the competitive landscape. It wasn’t the company’s biggest problem by any means, but it was a challenge nonetheless that nobody thought to address, creating an opportunity for someone (me!) to come up with a solution. I wasn’t fired, I ended up learning a lot about listening to people’s challenges and pain points, and to this day count that manager as one of my greatest mentors and sources of inspiration.
How Companies Can Instill A Problem Finding Mindset In Teams
Many companies large and small find ways to instill a Problem Finding attitude in their employees. Google was notorious for their 20% time in the company’s earlier days, with employee freedom to work on new problems leading to the creation of such big hits as Gmail.
Other companies develop entire divisions to think about Problem Finding and new opportunities for growth and engagement. At Doximity we’ve built out a Growth team focused on finding new channels and opportunities to introduce our business’ core value to new and existing users.
At the root of all this though is instilling a Problem Finding mindset into everyone who works at your company. Amazon touts that they are always at Day One, with their biggest opportunities still ahead of them. By providing this framing to everyone in your business, and encouraging employees to seek new opportunities and think about the problems that nobody is tackling yet, you create innovation levers in every corner of your company.
Work to develop a Problem Finding mindset. It’s not easy, as problems are hard to identify, but it’s better than sitting back and waiting for work to hit your plate. It’s important that we all work to be incredible Problem Solvers, but if you want to work on the next great thing, become a Problem Finder.
A sincere thanks to Josh Valdez for teaching me about Problem Finding, and for not firing me.
