Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Chapter 5. Box 1: Business Problem

Figure 5-1. Box 1 of the Lean UX Canvas: Business Problem

For Lean UX to be successful, teams must be given problems to solve, not solutions to build. Often, these “solutions” are expressed as requirements or feature specifications. But if requirements are the wrong way to go, what’s the right way? The right way is to understand and express the problem that stakeholders or clients are trying to solve. This is what business problem statements do. Business problem statements reframe the work in a way that explicitly demands that product discovery work take place.

While there is some flexibility in what a business problem statement can look like, at the very least it should:

• Provide a specific challenge for the team to solve rather than a set of features to implement.

• Anchor the team in a customer-centric perspective so that customer success is a baked-in part of the end goal.

• Focus the team’s effort by specifying guidelines and constraints that make it clear to the team what is in scope and what is out of scope.

• Provide clear measures of success expressed as key performance indicators of the business (desired impacts) or specific outcomes the company wants to see in its target audience.

• Not define a solution (this is surprisingly harder than it sounds).

Foundationally, business problem statements contain three parts:

1. The current goals of the ...