99% of problems are NOT worth solving, at a time
Inspired by an old article by my mentor, Hajime Hotta, along with the recent madness of myself at the recent weekly all-hands, I decide to put down my thought in this critical matter again: finding the right problem to solve.
There are always hundreds to thousands problems you can observe at work. Problems are around us not to break our work but to improve it towards our own growth. Growth involves pain. And one of the most painful things is to focus on the wrong problem at the start.
A wrong problem is a problem but with lower priority for the time being.
As a startup or anyone who has entrepreneurship NDA inside their blood would know that if we put our limited resources (money, time, …) to the wrong things, the result would be very brutal, esp. during break-or-make scenario.
This visualization is worth more than 10-year experiences in startup world:
In most of the cases, there is only one problem that we, as a whole team, should focus to solve it at a time. Otherwise, the team will be distracted and result in the bad end. It is also prone that you come to solve the wrong problem.
Prioritization that matters
We work with many problems everyday. That's why we have something to work. It is also prone to solve the wrong problem. Therefore, screening and prioritizing that would be key activity for anyone before any solution-related work happens.
A problem prioritized should be the one having:
- Business impact
- Product roadmap alignment
- Delivery performance improvement
A problem de-prioritized should be:
- Fancy things or like a lot others are using it
- Newest technology
- No data backup (either data tracking or manual collecting would bring you some important numbers that convince much better than words and lengthly slides).
The last note, any change that comes to execution is always high-risk, so please be careful to propose a change. Research well on pros and cons, having risk management plan, management commitment and discipline during execution should be important factors to deliver it with good results.
The article from Hajime-san shows the process of digging down how to solve the problem already so I would not repeat again. Check it out for more details.
