A problem statement is one sentence that says who is struggling, what they are struggling with, and when. Not what they need, and not what you are going to build.

It seems like a small thing to spend an afternoon on, and it sets the direction of everything you build after it.

The three parts

First of all, who. Not just "people", it has to be a specific set of people. Then what is it that they are struggling with. Then when, meaning what are they trying to do at the time.

You cannot build a product if you do not know what problem you are solving. Even if you already have the idea, you need to know what features should be in that idea, and the problem statement is what tells you.

What a real one looks like

Here is one of mine, for the nanny app:

Working parents cannot stay informed about their child's day without being interrupted and distracted during the workday.

Who: working parents who use a nanny. What: staying informed costs them their focus. When: during the workday, while they are trying to do their job.

Four ways it goes wrong

It is a founder vision statement, not a problem statement. "People need reminders to drink water during the day." That says what they need and why, and that is not what we care about.

It is an emotion. A student told me hers was for people who feel like they are not understood by their partners. That is not actually a problem, that is an emotion. We still had to find the problem underneath it.

It is a preference. "Users like apps that look nice." Yes they do. But a lot of the time people will use an app that does not look nice if it solves their problem, so that is not your problem statement.

It is too vague. If all you are saying is "people", what people? Some people never overspend anything. Who are these people, and why does it matter to them?

Drill down to the actual problem

The job of a product manager is to translate what the user says into what the actual problem is. You are not regurgitating what they told you.

That is the whole skill, and it is the part that takes longest to trust yourself on, because it feels like putting words in someone's mouth when you are new at it. You are not. You are working out what would have to change for the thing they described to stop happening.

Here is how much that matters. Say your statement is that team members struggle to prioritise their tasks. I might rewrite it as: team members struggle to understand which of their tasks are aligned to strategic objectives. Because the actual problem there is not the prioritising. If they know how their tasks are aligned, they will prioritise no problem. It is the understanding.

Those two sentences send you to two completely different products.

When you are stuck at that step, the five whys is the tool. Ask why, then ask why about the answer, and keep going.

If you built your app already, you still need this

It can be really hard when you not only use your app but you feel passionate about it. You are listing off the features that help, and inherently you know what problem they are solving, but you have never articulated it, because it is intuitive to you.

You need to break out of intuition and be able to say specifically that this feature solves this very specific problem for this group of people.

How many do you need

One primary problem, plus the smaller ones the individual features address. When it comes to building, you need to know which problem you are prioritising, because a good solution will usually address more than one.

If you are a solopreneur, the problem statement is enough. You do not need to learn user stories or job stories on top of it. Someone working inside a company does need those.

Keep reading

The Five Whys: How to Get to the Real Problem

Problem Space vs. Solution Space

Is My App Idea Good Enough? Here's How to Actually Find Out

Learn this with me

Writing the problem statement is class 1 of From Passion to Product, my free six-week live course. It is the first thing taught in the first class, before research, before users, before anything, because the wording of it changes everything that comes after.

Everything in the five weeks after it is checked back against that statement.

Join the waitlist to hear when the next free cohort opens. The App Strategy Workbook has the whole course with the exercises if you want to write yours this week.