There always seems to be a lot of startups building things like note-taking, dating and educational apps. These are seductive because the people building them are likely to be young, single and recently out of college, and it’s much easier to build something that solves a problem you know well. It’s harder to build something in a space that you don’t have day-to-day experience.
People who work on solutions in unusual niches like payments processing can hit on really lucrative solutions to pain points by leveraging their experience. So how do you gain that experience?
The Trivium
Back in the middle ages, after hundreds of years of sifting through the materials from ancient Greece and Rome, a method of teaching the “liberal arts” emerged that followed the pattern:
- Grammar
- Logic
- Rhetoric
Grammar focused on the underlying mechanics of language, such as vocabulary and sentence structure. It also focused on rote learning and memorization. It’s probably similar to how primary education works (or at least how it worked when I was a child), where you learn how to read and write, and also learn things like common sayings and simple poems.
Logic was a development on grammar. Going beyond the direct meaning of words, it dealt with how the ideas they expressed held together. The purpose was to question the material, understand the arguments being made, and generally think critically about the material you were reading.
Finally, rhetoric took the ideas that you learned in critiquing others, and taught you to create new ideas yourself, and to argue their validity in a persuasive way.
In a way, these could be thought of as:
- Grammar = what?
- Logic = why?/how?
- Rhetoric = what next?
BAS
At the time I read this, I was becoming a senior consulting civil engineer in Canada. That meant that I was the one teaching junior engineers how to approach their work. As always happens, you really deepen your understanding of a subject when you go to teach it to someone else. Anyway, I liked the general progression of the trivium, and I could see that it didn’t just apply to a liberal education.
Shooting from the hip doesn’t really work in civil engineering. It’s expensive to create drawings, and redoing them over and over is a great way to waste time. Instead, you need to be methodical and start at the beginning. Each project is basically a set of inputs and constraints, with a target that you are trying to achieve. The process I came up with to do this methodically was:
- Basis (derived from the greek for “foundation”)
- Analysis (“breaking up”)
- Synthesis (“composition”)
The basis of a project is the bare facts, so these should be assembled first:
- Who is the client? What are they trying to achieve?
- Where is the site? What are the conditions there like?
- What are the constraints? e.g. legal, environmental, cost.
With all the facts, analysis is then an interrogation of what you have assembled. The more fully you have gathered the facts, the more straightforward the analysis usually becomes. The outcome of the analysis is a mental model for how the elements of the project fit together. You can infer underlying mechanisms from the observations you have made, and from that assess how the clients goals conflict with conditions on the ground.
Finally, once you’ve made a model for how the project fits together, you can then start to experiment and create the design for something new.
There was a great side effect to this way of working: because everything flowed logically together in design, it made it easy to write clear, logical reports that explained why a project had to be done a certain way. Good communication makes it easy to retain clients.
Beyond Engineering
Civil engineering wasn’t the end of the story. I left many years ago, and I’ve since worked in roles that range between operations and product management (with a strong technical weighting) in the finance and insurance industries.
The same procedure still works. In fact it’s probably more important. Often, I’m approached by people who come with solutions rather than problems, which is at the wrong end of the process. Starting by assembling facts, then analyzing them leads to much more effective solutions than merely taking a solution spec and working through it.
It might seem here that I’m advocating for a waterfall-style product delivery method, but that’s not the case. In fact, this process supplements lean innovation methods very neatly.
Lean Innovation
Lean innovation is an iterative process that relies on developing assumptions, running measurable experiments to test those assumptions, then improving (learning). A typical product might go through the following stages 1:
- Problem - Solution fit
- Product - Market fit
- Scaling
People like to say that “there’s no bad ideas”, but from experience I can say that there are definitely good ones. I’ve done a lot of experimentation in my career, and I can tell you that you can have better ideas in areas where you know how things work than when you do not.
With the goal of moving more wisely, I try to learn as much as I can before starting to develop assumptions. This puts lean innovation into the synthesis stage of the process, so we have:
- Basis - gather facts: interview users in the field, review consultant reports, examine existing solutions to see who they are targeting and get a sense of their views of the problems.
- Analysis - assemble the facts together: try to fit these into a mental model to try and infer underlying mechanisms that are giving rise to your observations.
- Synthesis - build: armed with a model for how your problem space fits together, you can now make assumptions for how your interventions will play out. Better assumptions are more likely to lead to better experiment results.
Summary
Knowing more is better than knowing less. Lean methods are tactically correct, but strategically it can be hard to find your way if you don’t know the terrain. Methodically following a process of assembling a basis of facts then analyzing them to assemble a model of the underlying mechanism for your problem space can set the stage for a much more effective synthesis of something new.
Footnotes
Griesbach, D. 2023. Lean Innovation Guide↩︎