If you are starting to explore a website rebuild or another complex digital project, the chances are you are gathering requirements from stakeholders across your organisation.

This means bringing together people with various backgrounds, contexts and goals to share what changes they need. Sometimes, the abundance of hopes and dreams created at this stage of the project can result in difficulty in decision making and focus further down the line.

Using ‘problems to solve’, rather than requirements gathering offers a guiding light that helps create product focus, clarity on how to prioritise and a more collaborative approach to your project.

The risk of solving the wrong problem

Creating a list of requirements goes some way to demonstrate what is needed from a new digital product. However, a requirement does not clearly communicate why this feature is important or the breadth of people affected. This results in difficulties identifying where the priorities lie and why that requirement is more or less important than another.

This lack of clarity can often lead to a lack of shared understanding across an organisation and it can sometimes mean the focus is in the wrong place, which can result in a project requiring refocussing midway through which costs time and money.

Simplifying requirements with problems to solve

Using ‘problems to solve’ not only allows for a sleeker and more thought out set of outcomes from a project, but it can act as a facilitation mechanism. It helps teams and stakeholders to think about what they need, rather than devising solutions.

Lots of solutions this early on can stretch scope and make it difficult to assess the impact of each suggestion. Depending on someone’s knowledge of different operational areas, their understanding of what is being suggested might be limited. This can result in feeling disempowered, misunderstood and create conflict within decision-making parts of a project.

Start with a sentence

Begin with a very simple description of the problems you need your product to solve. This activity can be done collectively in a workshop with stakeholders or team members, providing a shared understanding of the breadth of issues or complexities that need to be addressed.

For example:

• Users can’t find the information they need quickly

• The comms team have to spend too much time pasting information into the CRM

Once you have these simple sentences, explore what the root causes for these things are. It might be that there are customer support tickets that share some insight, or analytics. Digging into this detail offers insight into how widespread the issue is and who else could be affected by it.

It should be possible to formulate short problem statements that encompass:

• who is experiencing the problem

• what is the detail of the problem

• why there is a problem

The process allows you to obtain different perspectives, providing everyone with the opportunity to ask questions and share concerns. It simplifies the language, making the process more accessible and easier to engage with. This creates a much more collaborative approach, which will lead to stronger relationships, understanding and, ultimately, buy-in and deeper trust between teams.

Prioritising problems

As each statement clearly articulates what issues need to be remedied, how widespread the issue is and the impact it might have, it is now possible to align the problems to solve with the organisational strategy and objectives.

Using techniques like MoSCoW a prioritised set of problems to solve can be identified quickly and collaboratively.

Acknowledging change

Complex projects often bring change, which can lead to worry, fear, or frustration within teams. People may fear that new ways of working or changes to processes might make their jobs harder. The ‘problems to solve’ approach can provide a bit more stability and shared understanding from the start.

Our experience shows that project success often mirrors how well teams are supported on their journey. When time and energy are spent ensuring everyone understands and feels empowered, they can engage more effectively and contribute to decisions in an informed way​​.

If you’re interested to try this approach in your organisation please get in touch. We’d love to hear how you might approach this.