3. How to Approach Problem-Solving in Product Development

Introduction: Understanding the MVP and Its True Purpose

When starting to address a problem in product development, it's essential to ensure there is a genuine need and demand for the solution you're creating. This is where Problem-Solution Fit comes into play. One of the most effective ways to explore whether a solution is viable is by creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The goal of an MVP is to test assumptions and learn quickly, not to build something halfway or poorly executed.

Unfortunately, many teams misunderstand the concept of MVP and use it as an excuse to launch underdeveloped products. An MVP should focus on delivering value and benefits to the user, testing whether your product solves their problem effectively.

Step 1: Ideation and Testing Solutions

Before diving into the full development of a product, you must first ideate and validate potential solutions. This helps remove bias and ensures that the direction you take is informed by real user feedback, not just assumptions from the team.

Ideation Process: Design Sprint

A Design Sprint is a method to address critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with users. It allows teams to place the user’s problem at the center of the discussion and co-create possible solutions. Cross-functional teams, including product, design, marketing, technology, and business specialists, come together to explore and prioritize solutions. The design sprint enables teams to:

  1. Focus on the challenge: Understand the user’s pain points and goals.
  2. Sketch potential solutions: Generate a variety of ideas for addressing the problem.
  3. Prioritize: Narrow down the best solutions based on user feedback.
  4. Prototype: Create a mock-up or prototype to simulate the experience.
  5. Test: Gather feedback from the target audience by testing the prototype.

By the end of a sprint, the team gains valuable insights from real users, helping them validate or invalidate key assumptions.

Example from O Boticário:
In the O Boticário case, the team conducted a design sprint to explore solutions for revendedores (sales representatives) and their customers. The sprint helped focus on the consumer journey, specifically how they interact with the product catalog and make purchases. This process led to the discovery of key pain points in the customer experience, such as the difficulty in navigating large PDFs and the limitations of catalog personalization.

Step 2: Mapping the Customer Journey

Once you have defined your target audience, the next step is to map their journey. This helps you understand where they encounter pain points and how they interact with the product throughout their experience.

Key Stages in Customer Journey Mapping:

  1. Awareness: How do users discover the product? (e.g., through advertisements or a catalog shared by a sales representative).
  2. Consideration: How do they explore and compare product options? (e.g., reviewing the catalog or engaging with the sales representative).
  3. Decision: What factors lead to making a purchase? (e.g., product recommendations, ease of ordering).
  4. Purchase: What is the checkout process? How do they receive and pay for the product?

By mapping out these stages, you can identify opportunities to improve the experience, solve pain points, and increase conversion rates.

Example from O Boticário:
O Boticário's team mapped out the journey of their sales representatives and customers, identifying pain points such as the inconvenience of downloading large PDFs and difficulty in navigating through extensive product pages. By focusing on the awareness and consideration phases of the journey, they were able to prioritize improvements that would streamline the customer experience, such as simplifying catalog navigation and ensuring quick access to relevant product information.

Step 3: Prototyping and Testing with Users

After understanding the user journey and ideating potential solutions, it's time to build and test prototypes. Prototyping allows teams to quickly validate or invalidate ideas before investing in full product development.

Prototyping Best Practices:

  1. Build low-fidelity prototypes: These are quick and inexpensive to create, allowing you to test different ideas and gather feedback without investing too many resources.
  2. Test with real users: Ensure that the prototype is tested with actual users who will benefit from the solution, rather than internal stakeholders or friends.
  3. Iterate based on feedback: Gather insights from testing, refine the prototype, and test again if necessary.

Example from O Boticário:
The O Boticário team built a simple digital product catalog prototype based on feedback from their design sprint and user interviews. They tested it with customers, focusing on features like product information clarity, ease of navigation, and the ability to send orders with a single click. This direct user feedback was instrumental in shaping the next steps and refining the product to better meet user needs.

Step 4: Launching a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

An MVP should focus on the core features that solve the user’s most pressing problem. It’s a way to learn from real users while minimizing development costs and time. The goal is to put a product into users’ hands, see how they interact with it, and gather data to inform further development.

Characteristics of an Effective MVP:

Example from O Boticário:
For their MVP, O Boticário manually enrolled 60 sales representatives, provided them with digital catalogs, and asked them to share the link with customers. The catalog focused on the most popular products, simplifying the selection process. Customers could send their orders directly via WhatsApp, creating a seamless experience that solved the biggest pain points identified during the journey mapping and testing phases.

Example from Nubank:
In the case of Nubank’s PJ account (business account), the MVP was deliberately stripped down to basic functionalities: users could only receive and transfer money and pay bills. Nubank avoided adding more complex features, such as credit cards or loans, in the early stages to focus on learning and improving based on user feedback. Early adopters played a crucial role in shaping the final product.

Conclusion: Learning Fast and Iterating

The key to attacking a problem in product development is learning quickly. MVPs, design sprints, and customer journey mapping all serve the purpose of accelerating the learning process. Once you gather feedback, iterate and improve the solution based on real-world data and user behavior.

By taking this approach, you ensure that the product not only solves a genuine problem but also delivers value to users from the earliest stages of development.