Problem space vs. solution space
Why the best products ignore traditional boundaries
You often hear this distinction in product organizations:
"Product management stays on the problem side, engineering is responsible for the solution."
Meaning, a product manager's job is to lead discovery — work with the customer, understand their problem — then prioritize problems by value to customer, cost to solve, and to coordinate the product roadmap with other stakeholders in the organization. Product managers take customer problems and break them down into epics and user stories to convey the narrative around what the customer is trying to get done.
Engineers then receive these problem statements and tackle the technical implementation: choosing tools, estimating scope, writing code, and delivering solutions.
Simply put: product is about the what and why. Engineering is about the how.
If only this separation was so clean — product transmits with perfect accuracy all the customer's pain, and engineering goes into the lab for 4 weeks and emerges with the perfect solution. Yet we know this isn't reality.
Maintaining this hard boundary is a great way to build a mediocre team that ships mediocre product.
In some broad sense, the two sides are concerned proportionally more with problems or solutions. Final "ownership" may rest with product and engineering respectively, but breakthroughs happen when we ignore this false wall. A more collaborative team of product managers, designers, and engineers — one that cuts across both problem and solution — gives you the best chance of success.
Even the most skilled product managers can't capture all the nuance of customer discovery in user stories. The most innovative products we've ever seen resulted from identifying unexpressed customer problems. Music streaming, iPads, Google search — at the time these hit the scene, users weren't clamoring for these specific solutions. They hit on latent demand and unlocked it.
Discovery isn't just about validating problems; the specifics of your solution matter deeply. Customers think about their problems through the lens of what they understand to be solvable. Many pains and frictions go unmentioned because customers might consider them impossible to solve. Who would have thought to ask for streaming movies when DVD-by-mail felt revolutionary?
Creating the solution is where we'll spend most of our time and energy. To maximize value, viability, usability, and feasibility, we need insights from product, engineering, and design during problem discovery. We need to increase the odds that we have a clear understanding of the problem space from different perspectives. The solution is informed by this understanding, the the more fidelity we have the better chance we have of building something interesting.
Poor solutions can mask genuine demand – users don't adopt bad products, even when they (allegedly) solve real problems.
Key Takeaways
The problem/solution divide between product and engineering is artificial and limiting
Innovation happens when teams collaborate across both spaces
Wider insight during discovery unlock solutions to unexpressed problems
Great products require deep understanding of both the problem AND solution space
Poor execution can kill good ideas – the quality of the solution matters as much as identifying the right problem