The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
This phrase is a mantra at many innovative companies, cited by Waze 
cofounder Uri Levine as well as Intuit CEO Brad Smith. Why should inno-
vators fall in love with problems and not solutions?
First, this keeps you focused on the customer and their needs. By forc-
ing yourself to describe the customer’s problem first (rather than the inge-
nious solution you are developing), you take an important step to ensure 
the innovation process is focused on customer value.
Second, focusing on the problem prods you to consider more than one 
possible solution. If your goal is the solution itself, there’s a temptation to 
stop generating new ideas when you hit on one idea that appears promising 
to your team and to move on prematurely to building it.
The third reason to fall in love with the problem is that you inevita-
bly become attached emotionally to a creative solution. It is hard to let 
it go. When Intuit’s Fasal team was focused on solving the problem of 
Indian farmers’ poor bargaining position, it was critical that they not stop 
after coming up with their first solution. As Hanson explained, “When 
you think you only have one idea, you’re unwilling to give it up. If you’ve 
got many ideas, you’re willing to see the evidence that they don’t work, 
and move onto the next. With the Fasal team—they quickly learned that 
the eBay-type marketplace wasn’t going to work; they quickly learned that 
their notion of helping farmers to plant more profitable crops wasn’t going 

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to work. If they’d only had one idea? Frankly, they might still be working 
on it today.”
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Get Credible Feedback
Once you have solutions in mind, it is essential that you gather credible 
feedback on your ideas. That credibility starts with the people you speak to. 
They need to be real customers or potential customers—not yourself, your 
colleagues, or your executive sponsor.
The stimulus for credible feedback is what you show those customers. 
It needs to be something real enough to generate meaningful results. In a 
convergent experiment, as we’ve seen, the feedback is based on the actual 
product, service, or experience you would ultimately provide. For an A/B 
test on its new menu items, Wawa tested the actual food with customers in 
real stores.
In a divergent experiment, the goal is to use prototypes. This allows 
you to save the expense of building an offering you have not yet designed 
but gives the customer enough stimulus to respond to. Prototypes can be 
made with simple materials, like paper or cardboard or clay, or with more 
sophisticated ones. GE has given out desktop 3D printers to employee 
teams across various functions to help them rapidly prototype new design 
ideas without having to leave their offices.
A common innovation mistake is to ask a focus group of customers 
to speculate on a product or service they’ve never seen, with no proto-
type with which to interact. Joe Ricketts is the founder of TD Ameri-
trade, now one of the largest online stock brokerages in the world. In the 
1970s, he was rapidly growing his new business as a phone-based service 
for stock trading. At the same time, he realized he needed to cut costs. 
Touchtone phone systems were just coming out, and he wanted to use 
them to offer self-service to his customers. When he asked focus groups 
if they would use a self-service option, they said, “No! Why would we 
want that when we could talk to a live broker?” Ricketts was nervous, so 
he decided to offer both options, with a big discount for the touchtone 
service. He didn’t install a backup for the touchtone system, figuring that 
if it failed temporarily, the customers could simply be offered the live bro-
kers instead. He was surprised, then, when the touchtone system did go 
down and the customers who had been using it complained about having 

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to go back to live operators! As Ricketts stressed to me, you simply can’t 
use focus groups to get credible feedback on a product or service that has 
never been in the market.
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