Problem Framing: How To Land Solutions Worth Pursuing

Before a problem or challenge can be solved, it needs to be fully understood. The same goes for product launches and marketing strategies. If you want a product or campaign to deliver, you need to know exactly what the customer wants, and what the business can endure.

Forbes tells us two key reasons why marketing campaigns fail are unclear positioning, and customer experience barriers. Both of these misses can be avoided if you apply the problem framing method. It will help you understand what your marketing strategy should be focusing on, before you go and create one that’s not worth implementing.

In this article, we’ll tell you what problem framing is, when it should be used (and why!), and we'll give you the 5-steps to apply it to your next big work challenge so you land the problem statement that’s worth pursuing!

What Problem Framing Is & What It Isn’t

Problem framing is a design thinking method used to analyze, define and understand complex business issues and problems at a deeper level. It involves viewing and grasping the problem from two needs angles:

By framing a problem in this way, the idea is to identify and verbalize a clear, core problem statement, which can then be used to develop a solution that delivers actual results. Results that produce the right kind of impact for both parties.

Problem framing is a team activity that can be used across industries and departments to aid decision-making in the early stages of a project, product or campaign journey.

However, problem framing is not a problem solving strategy. Instead, it’s the prework that needs to be done, if you want to come up with a solution that targets the central, core causes of the issue.

Applying the problem framing method helps you:

• Evaluate the true scope and size of the problem
• Structure your thought process in multifaceted ways to understand situations in their full context
• Establish the direction the solution building team should take
• Tackle the underlying core, foundational issues that might be causing multiple layers of smaller problems
• Prevent implementing solutions that will ultimately fail because they are temporary band-aid fixes for superficial, smaller problems.

When To Use The Problem Framing Method

The problem framing method should be used whenever there is more than one possible right answer or solution to a problem. This means it’s not intended for smaller, single or straight-answer problem scenarios. Instead, it’s intended for small or large-scale, multi-layered business or design challenges.

It’s a concept that craves a curious and open mind throughout the entire process. And that’s what gives it the potential to uncover multiple valid solutions.

Some industries and disciplines that depend on, and apply the method include:

• Product development – Its most common application is in product design and development.
• Program development – The model also works well in developing systems and programs within the government and public service sector, as well as not-for-profit organizations.
• Strategy development – Whether it’s a multi-national’s business strategy, or a small marketing agency’s client strategy, it can be adapted easily to small or large projects.

To give you a better idea of how the problem framing method can be used, we’ve put some common service-based business scenarios and challenges, which can benefit from the method.

Breakdown & Understand Complex Business Challenges

When you’re faced with an issue that is not easily defined, or spreads across multiple departments of your organization, it’s hard to work out where to start.

Using the problem framing method invites you to explore and decipher all the elements that combine to create your overarching challenge.

In most cases, you’ll find there are several causes and pain points that need to be addressed. But to come up with the right solution, you need to put those smaller problems into the broader context of your business and industry. And that’s why you need to break them down into their individual parts: to understand how they come together.

It also pushes you to invite all the people whose voices and opinions count. Engaging with stakeholders who have key touch points with the problem or challenge lets you collaborate and deliver more productive, in-depth discussions to frame the problem in its entirety.

Realign Effort & Resources To Market Needs

Sometimes, businesses suffer from tunnel vision. They get so involved in pushing through with their strategy, mission, and business objectives that they completely miss the market’s changing needs.

By applying the problem framing method regularly to your strategy, you can avoid spending time, money, and resources on projects and campaigns that no longer present any value to your customer base.

Because the method is focused on aligning business and customer needs, it helps you evolve your value proposition, making sure you remain relevant.

Find A Balance Between Business Priorities & Customer Needs

For a business to last, it needs to be sustainable. Focusing too much on business priorities and not enough on customer needs will lead to a loss of business. On the other hand, shaping your business entirely on pleasing customers and not enough on long-term business needs, will eventually lead to your downfall. Both of these scenarios can benefit from using the problem framing approach.

By holding a design thinking workshop with your entire team, you can take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This will help you integrate goals and needs, and find the right balance between customer-centricity and business success.

This is especially useful for product development. You’ll probably get hundreds of feature requests from customers. However, not all will align with your future roadmap of the product you envisioned. On top of that, they might not be vital features for your ideal customer profile. Using the problem framing method can help you identify which features you say yes to, and which you’ll need to turn down or delay for potential future updates.

Identify New Opportunities

New opportunities come in different forms. The first and most basic one might be to expand your current offering by taking your service or product to the next level. The second, might be to launch a complementary service your existing core customer base could benefit from, and the third might be to diversify completely.

But all these expansions are costly endeavors. So before you get knee-deep in ideation and project planning, you’ll need to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing.

Using the problem framing method can help you work out where there are gaps in the market that are good matches for your current business structure, stage, and model.

So, if you’re looking for growth opportunities with maximum return potential, the technique is a good starting point to identify which directions you should explore.

Develop Effective Marketing Strategies

Every effective marketing strategy is unique because it’s customized to the business. That’s what makes it work. The reason most marketing strategies fail is because they are either straight copy-paste strategies from other clients or they are based on assumptions. These might be assumptions about the customer and their needs or marketing channel suitability assumptions.

Problem framing can fix this because it invites you to analyze the business and customer as a whole. By taking into consideration the full scope of customer data and insights you have at your disposal, as well as the business’s results based on past campaigns, it minimizes the chances of your marketing strategy missing the mark.

The other thing you’ll get is clarity around positioning and blockers. What exactly is your value proposition, and how is this different from your competitors? What makes it better? On top of that, you’ll also determine if there are any operational barriers (think complicated registration processes) that are making customer interactions difficult, and therefore turning them away before they’ve even signed up for your product.

These are all questions you’ll answer in the problem framing process, which will eventually lead you to uncover the combination and true nature of the problem that needs to be addressed.

Why Businesses Avoid Problem Framing

When you look at the benefits of problem framing, it’s hard to understand why businesses skip or avoid this step. The answer lies into two places:

1. Focus on quick fixes & immediate results – Businesses and clients alike, want to see results fast. In most cases, this leads to developing quick band-aid fixes that on the surface seem to resolve symptoms, but rarely address the causes.
2. Lack of time, resources & skills – Few have the time, money or resources to focus on long-term quality results. The ones that do, tend to invest more time and money into researching and analyzing the problem instead of jumping straight into developing ideas, solutions and strategies.

Now that we’ve covered the rationale, benefits and use cases of the problem framing approach, we’ll explain how you can apply the method.

The Problem Framing Method In 5 Steps

There are five steps in problem framing. To help you grasp each one better, we’ll use a common, real-life marketing agency challenge as an example.

The challenge: Develop a marketing strategy for a B2B client X that provides productivity and work management software for service-based businesses.

Step 1: Gather Your Problem Framing Team

The first step is gathering the right people for your problem framing workshop. They fall into one of three categories:

1. Decision-makers – This group usually includes founders and executives. Depending on the type of business you’re in, it might include executive representatives from clients along with your business leaders. For our marketing example, you might have the agency founder, and the founder of your client company.
2. Experts & customer facing employees – The second group would include all the people who are affected by the challenge, and experts across the sectors where the challenge lies. In our marketing example, you would include SEO and marketing leads and senior strategists, sales and customer success and support leads and possibly representatives from the client’s product and customer facing teams.
3. Facilitators – The third, and most important group of people will be your workshop facilitators. These might be in-house or external professionals who have experience in design thinking concepts such as innovation managers, agile coaches or business consultants. In our example we’ll have our agency founder run the workshop because they have decades of experience in design thinking in B2B brand and product development.

Tip: The more diverse the composition of your team is, the better. Also, a highly skilled facilitator is vital in steering conversations in all possible directions to make sure no angle or perspective is missed or left uncovered.

Step 2: Define The Problem Within The Business Context

Next up is establishing the challenge or problem within the full spectrum of their industry and business context.

This might involve looking at:

If we take our marketing client example, we might ask the following questions?

• How many direct competitors are we up against in the productivity and work management software space, what are the ideal customer profiles they are targeting, and how do we compare in terms of price and offerings?
• What does the productivity and work management software industry look like at the moment? Is it growing or shrinking? Are vendors providing basic features or are they expanding their offerings and diversifying?
• Do we want to cast a wide net and catch as many customers as we can or do we want to focus in and niche out into one particular group of the market? Does our product, as it stands now, meet the needs of any particular niche groups?
• Is there a need that none of our competitors are meeting? Is there something we can do better or offer that nobody else has tapped into yet?

These are a few examples of questions you should ask. However, don’t feel restricted to stick to them alone. You should expand and ask as many questions as possible, and relate them to every area of the business.

Having all the stakeholders we mentioned in step one take part in these discussions will help you discover new questions as you exchange answers and ideas.

Tip: The key idea with design thinking is to never use restrictive language. Words like can’t, won’t, isn’t and impossible should be avoided at all costs. What you want to guide your workshop participant to focus on, is that anything is possible-kind of mindset. This is because words like could, might, and imagine, promote and nurture new possibilities, letting you come up with more innovative, creative answers.

Step 3: Align The Problem With The Business Need

The third step is to take the challenge or business problem, bring the broad context you’ve uncovered in step two, and align it to the business’s strategic needs and objectives.

Going back to our marketing strategy example, we might establish the client’s strategic objectives are to focus in on:

• Small-to-medium enterprises with up to 50 employees
• Business in the construction industry including property developers, engineers, architects, interior designers and landscapers.
• Businesses located in English-speaking countries including USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Tip: In this section you might also include key business metrics to measure success. For example, the client might be looking to increase their customer base by 20% in the next six months. Another metric could be to have 50% of their customer base come from businesses that have over 20 employees.

Step 4: Evaluate & Understand The Customer Perspective

Step four is to look at the customer and get a complete understanding of their user needs, expectations, and experience.

This could include:

• Conducting research and surveys on your customer to find out what their real needs and pain points are. You might want to split research into existing customer base insights and potential ideal customer insights.
• Experiencing the customer onboarding process for yourself to identify inefficiencies that might turn customers away.

If we look at our marketing client example, we might take on the following activities:

• Set up one-on-one calls with the client's top 20 customers to get individualized feedback and tap into the language they use for expressing needs and pain points. This is vital if we want to create marketing content that resonates with them.
• Send out a survey to the remaining customer base and offer an online voucher as an incentive to complete the survey.
• Get your onboarding team to ask a few questions of recently onboarded customers on what they thought of the experience from start to finish, and if there is anything we can improve on.

Tip: This second-last step is all about making sure you come up with a problem statement that hits the bulls-eye from a customer centricity perspective. The more information and insights you have access to, the more refined your statement and solution focus will be.

Step 5: Develop A Clear Problem Statement

The final step is to clearly define the problem or challenge statement which will inform and guide the solution path worth taking.

Your problem statement should:

• Grasp, consolidate, and unify all the insights you’ve gained from the problem framing steps.
• Identify where the overarching solution between business context, strategic needs and customer wants lies.

If we circle back to our marketing example a highly simplified version of the problem statement might be:

Client X is in a highly competitive SaaS sector. To bypass the big players who focus on a broad customer base, and have exhaustive marketing budgets, X needs to focus on a niche market. This niche is service providers in the construction industry, ideally property developers, architects, engineers, interior designers and landscaping businesses of 50 employees maximum.

We know our customers want a centralized platform that’s easy to use, and lets them manage their entire client workflow from initiation to completion. Their key pain points are high subscription costs, an extensive learning curve and complicated onboarding process.

Tip: Your problem statement should be as short and concise as possible. Generally you want to keep it under 300 words. However, the larger the problem or challenge, the longer your problem statement might need to be.

Use ActiveCollab To Run Virtual Problem Framing Sessions

Problem framing guides you to analyze your challenge from the perspective of the business’s strategic objectives, as well as the customers’ needs. But it also pushes you to evaluate it within the broader business or industry landscape.

As a team collaboration platform, ActiveCollab lets you run virtual problem framing sessions with your teams and clients to come up with impactful solutions for all your key business challenges.

With its discussion feature, you can create online workshops, invite your stakeholders, and gather insights to help you frame your business problem in the right light. When you’re finished, you can turn the discussion into a task and assign it to one of your team members to start working on a solution plan.

As a productivity and workflow management tool, ActiveCollab is made for any and all types of client-facing business. But the ones that love us most are marketing and creative agencies. That’s because we centralize all their client work, and let them run their entire business more efficiently thanks to our resource and capacity planning capabilities.

If you’re after a tool that streamlines your business and team management, and lets you take client work from idea to invoice, why not give us a go? Sign up to our 14-day free trial or book a demo for a guided tour with one of our people!