Before You Start Working on a Solution, Make Sure You are Answering the Right Problem

One of my university professors had a saying whenever we did market research projects: garbage in, garbage out.

If you aren’t inputting relevant data, the resulting data analysis insights are useless to the client.

Similarly, in other business scenarios, if you aren’t working on the right problem, you’re wasting time.

Our team has been going through strategic planning for our clients, and a member of the team presented their content strategy to improve the content style and writing flow. The objective is two-fold, to increase subscribers to the account and to increase content readership.

The strategy is solving a problem downstream from the key problem: a lack of account subscribers.

The root of the problem is a lack of awareness, which meant that no matter how much we improved the writing style and flow, it wouldn’t matter because not many people are aware of it.

We aren’t solving the right problem.

“We aren’t solving the right problem”

If we increase the awareness and exposure of the account so more people are aware of it and improve the content quality at the same time, then it should follow that the number of article reads would improve; if the article is engaging and share-worthy, then article reads should also go up.

It helps to start with the question: “what are we trying to achieve?” Before diving into solving the problem. It’s true when they say define the problem and you’re halfway to your solution. If you don’t know where you’re trying to go, how would you know you’re on the right track?

If your problem is to increase revenue, focusing on reducing expenses isn’t the right solution. Now, if your objective is to increase profit margins, then yes, reducing expenses would be the right solution.

The next time you a problem arises, take the time to find the origin of the problem so you can avoid the “garbage in, garbage out” issue.