Love your problem more than my own solution

by Susanne Schustin

I am contemplating the tool box of the CIO, and our deep understanding of and the ability to optimize cloud, infrastructure, software development, service delivery processes, IT security etc. is a given. It is your ticket to play and not the topic today.

What I am thinking about is what you learn on page 1 of the book on communication – You are Not Your Target Group.

So, my question to you is, when was the last time you had the privilege to talk to your companies’ customer? When did you have a conversation about what it is that is driving their business, and where your product is enabling them?

In the best of times, your IT team designs, builds and runs solutions which supports, enables and maybe even delight the customers of your organization. It goes without saying for products to consumers, but the absolute same is true in my world of B2B. Maybe you have a little longer leach if your customers are finding it difficult to substitute you very quickly, but in the long run, no one stays if their intentions and needs are not met by your services. And that is when we need to remind ourselves that we are NOT the customer and thus not the target group of our products. So how do we create solutions that makes them want to stay?

When we do hackathons, my team wears t-shirts which says on the back: “Love your problem more than my own solution”. It is a reminder to spend uncomfortably long time truly understanding the problem before we do what we love more than anything, which is head straight for the keyboard and punch and punch until we proudly hold up OUR newest creation for the whole world to admire.

Except often when we do that, the success of the product is proportional with our ability to solve the real pain or create the real gain. The less energy and true, curious, unbiased exploration we have engaged in, the greater the risk of not hitting the target. Not listening carefully enough results in lovely products… for you. Not for them.

Banal, so far? Yes, I agree. So why is it still difficult then? Why is the business world not filled with solutions which your customers are positively addicted to using?

When we say the sentence “You are Not Your Target Group” we actually also say so much more. We imply that they, our customers, is the expert on their life world and so is any target group. They are the experts on how their business run, who they interact with in their market, what their pains are, where they struggle to be as productive as tehy would like, where they are getting negative feedback from those whom they serve.

What our target group are NOT experts on is how we as partner and supplier can help them, and the most common mistake we make, when we set out to talk more to our customers, is asking them what they want from us. And worse, when we ask “Would you like this feature; would you like this product?”

The question is naïve, and it will only ever produce a pseudo conversation and lead you directly to create a less than optimal solution. Remember the quote attributed to Henry Ford saying “If I had asked people what they want they would have said faster horses”?

People know their problem. They do not know your solution to it, and honestly cannot have an opinion on it, before they have a tangible experience of living it. So stop asking them.

We as providers of solutions are ALSO experts. We are experts on how our products could create value; we are experts on what we could possibly make work, with our technology, we are experts on how we could leverage say for instance the vast pool of data we create every day.

So my point is: it is when you meet your target group as experts on their own life and explore what is the true pain and what would constitute a true gain for them, that you can go home an apply your expertise on your potential for value creation, that you have a chance of creating something valuable and delightful for your customers.

We call it co-creation with our customers… we talk and listen, we create a first pitch, show it and see if it stirs something… we listen some more… improve the mock-up… see how it works… launch a MVP… listen and analyse usage some more…. Until we fell we can scale this enough. And we remind ourselves, that it is never done. The conversation continues, when we love your problem more than our own solution, and so does the value creation.

** No artificial Intelligence co-created this blog post. Just old-school, hand-held communication theory, see for instance John Fiske on Communication Studies from 1982 **