#29 Product Workshop Step 1: The Foundational Problem
This weekend I am headed to a mastermind with 6 other education creators. I'm leading our product session on day 1 and so I decided to bring you along for the journey – today's newsletter gives you the same homework I gave our mastermind attendees.
All our businesses are diverse from virtual presentations coach, niche healthcare training, motion graphics design and more. But the customer journey work we'll do during our product session will apply regardless.
No matter your business type, this exercise is going to help you build your customer journey so grab your notebook and let's get into it–
The goal of our product workshop is to look at our business customer journeys and identify the gaps to improve or create new products.
Before zooming in to each product in your business individually, it’s helpful to align on the high level problem that you focus your business solutions on. I like to call this the foundational problem.
It is the core service of your business– you help solve this foundational problem for your community and customers.
The exercise below will help you write a problem statement.
When you consider developing new products or improving the ones you have, you’ll ask yourself if this product is serving your customers on a journey to solve this foundational problem.
Problem statements should be rooted in research.
If you look at the prompt below and realize that either (1) you have no idea or (2) what you’re writing is entirely based on assumptions, then your first step is do some broad strokes “discovery” research by interviewing prospect and/or existing customers and by running a survey. I wrote you a step by step guide for this here.
The foundational problem your business solves will be high level and broad – it’s something that many products or levels/tiers of a product will be needed to solve.
You will serve your community facing this problem at the earliest stages of your customer journey and toward your higher ticket offers as well.
Write your core problem statement for your business using this template:
[YOUR CUSTOMER] needs [CUSTOMER NEED] because/so that [INSIGHT OR WHY]
Let’s break those components down:
Your customer:
Try to be as specific as you can but this might be broader than a typical 'who is your customer' exercise.
Customer need:
What is the overarching pain point that they have and need solved?
Insight or why:
What is the root cause of the problem? Why does it need solved?
Here is an example for my business:
[Education content business owners] need [help understanding their customer journey and creating quality digital products that serve their communities] so that [they can serve their customers longer and therefore grow their revenue].
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