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What even is a pain point?

bethanycuenod

I have had my fair share of silly desks. And by silly desks, I mean ridiculous setups to try and make my space work for me.


I've used ink cartridge boxes


I've used pizza stands


I've used oatmeal containers and puzzle boxes


I even built my own standing desk at the beginning of the pandemic


I've also run cables funny, changed my desk set up a bunch of different times, used the speaker audio from one device, but the microphone from another because I didn't like the way one sounded but the other didn't pick up my voice well.


In short, I'm always trying to make things work for me regardless of the situation, and thankfully, I'm not alone. Hybrid work, remote work, work from where ever, whatever-you-want-to-call-it work has resulted in this weird, beautiful amalgamation of people problem solving for the environments they are in and I LOVE IT. Both from the perspective of finding pain points as a product manager and personally because how people solve their own problems has always fascinated me. There's an entire layer of creativity underlying it all and I love seeing how it blossoms in every individual. Even people who wouldn't classify themselves as creative end up creatively solving for their situations, addressing their own 'pain points'.


Though, I kind of despise the word pain point. It could be because as I am someone who has suffered through a few injuries, pain has always mentally had the correlation as a physical problem or something you can actually point to. But people don't talk about themselves in terms of pain points and I would argue that most of the 'pain points' that a business is seeking to solve isn't actually something their customers are vocalizing or pointing to, at least, not to their knowledge. Businesses that are only solving for the issues that their customers are vocalizing or bringing up are really only solving for the short term.


Good businesses, or good solutions/innovations/products, should be solving for the unspoken. They need to be providing a fix for something the customer has most likely already solved for themselves or at least ones that they are more likely to show you and not tell you.


Take for example all of my desk illustrations above. The problem I was attempting to solve was how to be the most productive when away from my desk. My initial solve was getting an external display, but that resulted in weird ergonomics, with me constantly having to turn my head to see the other screen. Then I tried putting them side by side with another keyboard centered in the middle, but that just resulted in me not only having to carry more stuff around, but also always looking down and being hunched over. The latest iteration I'm on is one where I've attempted to reduce the number of peripherals I have by putting the display on top of the other display and having everything centered, but I'm still having to carry around something to stack to put it at a reasonable height.


I needed to solve a problem and I made it work for me in each of these instances. This solutions engineering, this creative problem solving I'd engaged in, was just me looking for the best way to be productive, but the actual problem I was solving for was how to have a productive setup that was the most ergonomic. Being on the road meant that even though I'd be changing locations frequently, I'd still be working in these situations for long periods of time. What I needed was an ergonomic set-up, but if a product manager or someone had asked me what my biggest remote work 'pain point' was, I would have said that the external display uses my notebook as a power source which means my battery doesn't last as long. They would have missed the true context of the problem because they didn't observe the things I'd already been solving for.


One of the best ways to innovate and gain insight to create solutions or products is through observation and questions while observing. Sure, use surveys and some other quant methods to validate the findings, but observe first. You're going to end up with great surprises and better ways to help people.






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