Learning to love the problem

Why product discovery shouldn’t end on the whiteboard but continue throughout every product release

After years of working with clients in a variety of industries, I decided to take the leap and immerse myself in something completely new. Foundations, grant management and grant seekers are my new ‘industry’. The tax authorities, legal and governance elements of my understanding are a crucial component that influences the product design at every stage.

To be able to make a product that could have a huge impact on society, through the release of funds to individuals, has given me a real sense of purpose to my work. But understanding the complexity of this world in the last year, has revealed to me why I think it is the last industry to be digitally transformed.

Paper based processes, digitally excluded stakeholders, GDPR and regulatory compliance all amount to an area largely untouched by software. And for the 10,000 small foundations in Denmark having an affordable system that fulfils these needs is hard to come by. Add to that the COVID-19 situation, and it has emphasised the need to work differently and to embrace the benefits of digital tools to get a complex job done.

Design research needs reflection

After working within finance, the public sector, pharma and retail for my entire career you have a good idea about how to gain a deeper understanding to solve a problem. There are many well established design tools, but what you seldom hear about are the gaps of understanding that can occur when using these tools.

As designers, the expectation and pressure to synthesise findings quickly can create solutions that are unrefined or deserve more reflection. But time simply runs out. Many products today are either compromises, or are treatments for ailments a customer has complained about. But they seldom cure the underlying problem, simply because most insights are based on the present state of affairs and not a future state.

Product discovery and learning must be prioritised at all times

At Grant Compass we find that the trick is to keep ‘discovery’ open as long as is possible, not only whilst in the prototyping phase but also in the build phase.

Even in Beta we try and keep an open mind with regards to the inputs we receive and the changes we make to the product are due to them. This agility is core to how we work, and we believe if you cannot adapt to inputs you receive in the live environment then your product is in stasis.

There is another reason for this — we simply do not have enough information and the truth is we probably never will about our customers. Taking a humble approach to knowing your customer is best. After all, the only thing we really can be confident about them, is that in the future they will be different. Both in how they interact with the system and how society interacts with them.

In my previous job knowing was everything, thats why you are hired as an agency. You were expected to know more than your clients about their customers and their industry. And yet the truth is not what you know but how you learn from not knowing. ‘How’ being the methods to keep the learning relevant up to releasing code.

Knowing what you don’t know is essential

You also need to love not knowing and be fine with it. For the command and control types this is a really uncomfortable place to be, but it allows you to discover. A beginner’s mindset is unburdened by prejudice or bias. But it quickly becomes ‘expert’ the more knowledge it is exposed to, and it takes effort to keep from being indoctrinated.

Knowing you will never get complete knowledge actually serves you well as it increases vigilance against complacency and any arrogance for ‘knowing better’.

‘Loving a problem’ is dependant upon loving learning

With customers, learning never stops, as their needs and wants shift, the product must continue to deliver its value, and adapt to change.

As the problems and complexities increase in modern society, we need to focus always on the human inside the digital world we now live in. Every day the focus in our work must be to make lives better for those we serve, through the products we design and build.

At Grant Compass we are building a product and a platform to make it effortless for both grant seekers and grant managers to connect. Making individuals aware of support they can receive will help release donations and in turn address income inequality by giving people easier access to funds.

Now whats not to love about that?

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