Issue #2 | Awesome Problem Prioritization Framework that can do wonders for your Product-Market Fit

Framework to find your Product-Market fit for your product or feature sooner!!

This weeks newsletter edition brings a prioritization framwork that helps PMs, Researchers or Founders, validate on which customer problems to work on first and get the Product-Market fit for your product or feature sooner. I recently used this framework for one of my side project and found it really helpful to get a validation on the problems priority.

We as product people, focus a lot on prioritization of features and ideas but we need to take a step back and ask the question which problems to prioritize first and then only think about the solution space. When we understand which problems have bigger impact on our customers and our business it will results to better outcomes.

I recently came across this problem prioritization framework called Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR) from Twitter-wizard and Stripe product genuis Shreyas Doshi (Twitter: @shreyas) which acts as a tool for true validation of customer problems.

What is Customer Problem Stack Ranking???

The Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR) determines the importance of your idea in comparison to the other issues that your target customers face. It's a straightforward data-driven method for determining whether your idea solves a major problem or is just a minor annoyance.

How to apply this framework in real life issues?

To apply this framework effectively, follow these steps mentioned below,

Step 1: Turn Your Ideas Into A Problem Statement

It is very important to potray your idea in the form of a problem because customers can easily related to it. One more reason to not potray it as an idea is because there is high probability of people saying yes to your idea without understanding the actual problem. You need to fragment your idea into multiple problem statements to understand the depth of the issues your idea is solving.

For eg., Instead of asking your target customer that if this idea solves X issue, what you can ask is, while performing a particular task do you face this X issue. Getting a yes no or maybe validates whatever hypothesis you had about the existing issue

You need to fragment your idea into multiple problem statements to understand the depth of the issues your idea is solving.

Step 2: Determine the importance of each problem to the target customer

Once an idea is fragmented into multiple problem statements, you need to determine the problems in terms of HIGHEST IMPORTANCE and LOWEST IMPORTANCE. Which problem is more pressing to your target customer and which needs to be addressed first. If you don’t do this, you are probably solving a problem which has minimum impact and doesn’t provide great value to your customers.

For eg., Let’s say you have Problems A, B, C & D: You can ask which problem has higher importance A or B, B or C, C or D, A or C, A or D so on and so forth. This can become arduous if there are too many problem statements and for that i have a great tool for you which does all of this for you, which i will be sharing at the end, so continue reading this till the end 😬

Step 3: Ask your target customers

Once all these questions are prepared, next thing is to get your hands dirty, get into the field and ask your target customer. Also be flexible in adding more problems if the customer has a different problem which you didn’t think about so that you can validate that as well in your future interactions with target customers

Step 4: Analyse

At the end of this, you will see priorities emerging and you can then analyse if you have found the real problem or you need more research with this

You can do it manually which would look something like this:

Now for those who sticked until the end and don’t want to execute all this manually, I have a perfect tool for you😉 The tool is called OpinionX which is especially built on this framework to find out product-market fit. Go check this out and experiment.

I hope you found something useful from this article and if you did, kindly like and share this article to your friends or someone who might find it useful. That would be really great 😁