8 Questions To Validate a Problem Worth Solving

One of the most important steps in the product lifecycle process is the Problem Validation phase. This is the step right up front where you validate that a proposed innovation solves a customer problem worth solving. It’s easy to fall in love with a solution to a problem that isn’t very interesting. It’s also easy pursue a solution without actually understanding the core problem it’s trying to solve. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been guilty of both at some point in my career :).

The Problem Validation phase is designed to ensure that you’ve both clearly articulated the target problem, and that the problem is painful enough that customers will put high value on your solution. Bottom line; if you haven’t picked a big enough, painful enough customer problem to solve, the solution itself doesn’t really matter.

The first step in this phase is to formulate the problem statement that your innovation proposes to solve. This problem statement should be written in the form of a hypothesis that can be validated or invalidated with your target customers / users through a series of validation questions. If this is your first time doing this, it can be very thought provoking (i.e., you may have actually skipped past the actual problem you’re trying to solve) but also a bit awkward to frame the hypothesis.

As a simple example for illustrative purposes, let’s say you’re a PM for an email MarTech company and you have an idea to create a set of email templates that users can choose from when creating a new email campaign. Framing the underlying target problem hypothesis might look something like this:

“Email marketers find it painful that every time they want to create a new email campaign, they have to create it from scratch”

Now that you have a target problem framed in the form of a hypothesis, you can test that hypothesis to gauge the validity and pain level of the problem. In most cases, it’s best to do the validation through 1×1 customer interviews so that clarifying questions can be asked along the way. It usually takes between 7 and 15 customer validation sessions before you have confidence one way or the other on whether it’s a painful enough, broad enough problem to go solve.

The general strategy of each validation session is to paint a picture of the problem you’re trying to solve, and then gauge the customer’s response to the problem, the validity of the problem, the pain level of the problem and how they’re currently solving the problem today.

Using the simple example above for context, here are 8 great questions to ask as part of your problem validation script. These questions may also reveal aspects of the problem that lead you to rethink the best solution. Also, don’t forget to ask a few “customer profile” questions up front that can be used to segment out insights in the case you have different personas that use your product (i.e., one persona may perceive the problem to be much bigger than another persona).

8 Problem Validation Questions To Ask:

1. Does this problem (always having to create new campaigns from scratch) resonate with you?

2. What’s the hardest part about creating a new email campaign?

3. Can you tell me about the last time you created a new email campaign? What was the hardest part about it?

4. How often do you create new email campaigns?

5. What, if anything, have you done to make email campaign creation easier?

6. How much (time / money) are you spending to create new email campaigns today?

7. What don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried?

8. How would you rate the difficulty (1 – 10) of creating new email campaigns compared to other business tasks you typically perform?