This course is for entrepreneurial managers who are looking for tools and techniques to introduce exciting, innovative products or services to market quickly and informed by high-quality customer insights. It is applicable to a range of organizations from small-medium sized enterprises through to corporates, and across a range of industrial segments. The problem this course helps address is the constant pressure managers face to be innovative and introduce novel products and services for their customers. However, many creative ideas get ‘stuck’ in the boardroom or are subject to intra-organizational tensions or group think. This course provides methodologies to break through these challenges. We build on the widely known concept of design thinking but update it and apply it to advance business strategy and entrepreneurship. Over five weeks you will learn what ‘design strategy’ is, how it differs from traditional design thinking and business strategy, and how it can be used to improve existing products or services in your business, or introduce breakthrough ideas. We will also provide an exclusive, deep-dive into the practical application and impact of these strategies in one of Australia’s newest, most innovative financial institutions, UBank, and the global re-insurance giant, Swiss Re. Through conversations with their Senior Executive Leadership Teams, including UBank’s CEO, we will explore how they have embedded innovation through design thinking. By the end of this course, you will have a set of tools to inform product design and development for your own start-up, or to extend the product roadmap of an established organization.
What is a problem definition statement?
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From the course by The University of Sydney
Design strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship
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The University of Sydney
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From the lesson
Primary market research and problem statement definition
In this module we'll look at how to plan and conduct primary market research and how to analyse the results. We'll then step through how to craft a meaningful problem definition statement.
Meet the Instructors
Eric KnightAssociate Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation
Discipline of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship
We've seen that your primary market research
helps to inform you about the problem you're trying to solve.
We're now going to look at a problem definition.
A problem definition statement helps set the road map for your company.
A robust and well-researched problem definition statement
ensures that your product or service is delivering against an actual problem,
whether that problem be internally or externally, for your customers for instance.
We will look at
the problem definition process and
the tools we can use to support the problem definition process,
including empathy mapping, point of view statements, and brainstorming.
Our aim is to use each of these tools in order to develop
a robust problem statement that clearly and succinctly addresses the problem at hand.
So, let's take a deeper look into each of
these steps in turn, starting with empathy mapping.
Empathy is usually defined as standing in someone
else's shoes or seeing through someone else's eyes.
It's the ability to identify and understand another situation, feelings, or motives.
An empathy map will help you better understand your customers' needs,
and it enables you to develop a deeper understanding of
the people you are providing a product or service to.
Empathy maps are related to your customer personas.
They provide an easy way of rapidly
determining how your personas will react to different situations.
Generally, the empathy map is broken into four quadrants: thinks,
feels, says, and does.
An empathy map can either be developed as
an abstract tool linked to a specific customer persona that you have developed,
or you can use an empathy map to record the reactions of
actual or potential customers you have engaged through interviews or focus groups.
You'll get a better outcome if you populate an empathy map in a team setting,
so, with the colleagues that are working on this project with you perhaps.
This helps ensure that
your own psychological biases are not
influencing the observations of the individual or persona.
From the mapping, you can now make assumptions on the personas' most obvious,
relevant, and demanding needs.
This will be a big help in identifying and defining the problems.
Now you can go on with the next tool in your problem definition toolbox,
which is generating a point of view statement.
Your point of view statement is
a guiding statement that focuses on specific customers or consumers.
It brings together the insights and needs that we were
uncovering during the empathy mapping process.
A well-thought-out point of view statement will allow you to
ideate and solve your problem in a goal-oriented manner.
It will keep you focused on your customer or consumer,
their needs, and your insights about them.
So, how do we arrive at a point of view statement?
The first step is to choose which customer persona you are going to work through.
Is the problem more relevant for one customer persona than another?
If so, focus on that one.
Make sure you refresh yourself on
the most pressing needs as raised during the empathy mapping exercise.
Next, extrapolate a narrative insight statement that draws together
a rationale for why this persona has a specific need. Here's an example.
Persona: Rachel, a 32-year-old who lives alone in the CBD.
Need: needs to eat three meals a day.
Insight: as a single person living in the CBD,
Rachel needs to do her grocery shopping but
doesn't want to carry home heavy shopping bags.
She also doesn't always eat at home.
It's important to Rachel that she has fresh produce at a reasonable price.
Lastly, we turn this into a single sentence, the point of view statement.
For example, Rachel needs access to a reasonable priced, flexible,
home delivery grocery service because fresh produce is
important to her and she doesn't want to carry home heavy shopping bags.
Finally, we do some brainstorming.
Brainstorming is generating ideas to solve a problem.
It's usually done with a group of people,
rather than by yourself.
So, these may be a group of colleagues at work,
external stakeholders, customers or consumers.
To get the most out of a brainstorming session,
make sure you have an experienced facilitator to
connect or make associations out of all of the incredible,
yet seemingly disconnected ideas that will come out of the session.
Facilitators also play an important role in
setting the tone for the session and keeping it focused.
Some other important aspects to consider to set
your brainstorming session up for success include,
start with a well-defined problem statement so that
you're crystal clear about what it is you're trying to achieve.
What is this brainstorming session really about?
Set a strict time limit.
This will make you focused and churn out
as many ideas as possible without getting too off track.
Be really open minded,
make sure you allow all ideas to be presented
without criticism either from yourself or your colleagues.
Sometimes it's the most out there idea that ultimately becomes the best solution.
So, don't shut it down before it stands a chance.
This can be easier said than done,
but it's incredibly important.
The more ideas, the better.
Give yourself as many options from which to generate a winning solution as possible.
Taking a 'more is more' approach will also help foster
an environment where all ideas are encouraged no matter what.
Be visual.
You don't just need to make a dot list on a whiteboard.
Draw, scribble, connect ideas with different colored pens or sticky notes,
do whatever you can think of to really bring your ideas to
life and to view and connect the ideas in different ways.
Finally, we can bring all these together in a problem definition statement.
A problem definition statement is
a short description of the issues or problem that needs to be addressed.
And short is the operative word here,
just a sentence or two.
A problem definition statement is important because it will
guide and focus you on specific needs that you have uncovered.
A problem statement also sparks interest,
generates ideas, and excitement.
A problem definition statement must be human-centered.
That is, it needs to be focused on
your users and the people you're trying to solve a problem for.
It also needs to be broad enough to inspire creative thinking,
but narrow enough to be realistic.
Let's explore each of these a little more.
A human-centered problem definition statement
should align with the insights you have gathered through
developing customer personas and
conducting priming market research and your empathy mapping.
The statement is also about the persona,
not your venture and not the product or service you were developing.
The problem definition statement should be broad enough to inspire creativity,
but narrow enough so that
the problem definition statement is grounded, realistic, and achievable.
Don't restrict your thinking to technical or operational requirements.
But at the same time,
don't create something that's overly daunting for your team.
So, now we've looked at the problem definition process.
You should have a good understanding of how to apply empathy mapping,
point of view statements, and brainstorming in
the development of a robust problem statement.
And that brings us to the end of the module,
where we've learned how to conduct primary market research,
analyze its results, identify and develop customer personas,
and craft a problem definition statement.
So, we have gone through quite a lot.
But best of all,
we've learned all about it from the lived experience of
a large and successful corporate case study
to see how it directly applies in a business setting.
I really hope you got a lot
out of
this module.
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