Listening is the best way to go "problem hunting."

I’ve never been hunting.

But after devouring the book Problem Hunting: The Tech Startup Textbook, by Brian Long, founder of Attentive and TapCommerce, I realized that I do love to go on “problem hunting” expeditions. If you haven't read Brian's book, I will quickly plug it - it’s a great read!

A general reflection on problem hunting - it's critical to success and it's a continuous effort.

I used to attend a few startup pitch events every month before the pandemic. I loved the energy, loved hearing founder stories and why they were so passionate about what they were building.

Of course, the quality of the pitches were always mixed. The bad ones gave off the “We have a solution in search of a problem!” vibes.

The best pitches, however, were deep dives into really big problems…big problems in terms of the pain, but narrow in terms of the focus.?

The stories of how entrepreneurs discovered, or hunted, these problems were always inspiring.

Before we started Electives, looking back, I was naive to think that “problem hunting” was something you do in the early days of starting a business. In reality, you problem hunt forever.

Problem hunting in Corporate L&D has many layers.

Having spent the last 3+ years in the corporate training world, it takes time and patience to discover the various layers of problems within any given market. The big problems are glaring and obvious, but sometimes, so big that you can’t actually solve them.

First, like many industries, there is no shortage of problems in corporate learning! If you left the “corporate training house” to go out hunting for problems, you would come back with enough problems to feed not only your family, but entire villages!

Let’s start with the high level problem and work our way down.

Level 1: “Corporate training sucks.” That was actually the opening sentence in one of our investors, and now Board Member, Mike Troiano ’s blog about Why we invested in Electives. There are outlier companies of course who do training well, but almost everyone we chatted with agrees with this sentiment. At some point, at some company, we’ve all experienced mind-numbing training. It’s the sad reality. It is a problem that is universally relatable. Outcome: fix corporate training.

In the spirit of problem hunting, yes, the industry is known as boring and uninspiring, but that’s an entire market. Let’s drill down further.

Level 2: It only took a few interviews with Chief People Officers in the early days to have a consensus that pre-recorded, asynchronous training libraries were not engaging their employees and it certainly wasn’t developing them. Ah ha! Stale, pre-recorded training was another problem. Everyone is lonely enough nowadays; no need to further isolate people and ask them to watch an average piece of content by themselves. People wanted modern, fresh content and an opportunity to interact with their instructors and their peers. They wanted to learn together. Outcome: Optimize live, virtual interactive training with modern content.

Level 3: Once we narrowed in on live over async, there became another fork in the road within live learning: as a People leader within a business, you can create and deliver new live content internally for employees or you can curate live learning outside of your company to be delivered to your employees. Alas, more problems arose: on the internal side, keeping pace with today’s workforce learning needs feels impossible, especially for lean People teams. Creating content is time consuming and incredibly difficult, particularly when it ranges from Manager Training to AI Prompt Engineering to How to talk about Mental Health. A small number of folks internally creating and delivering that wide a range of content did not feel like the future of learning. Outcome: focus on content curation over content creation.

Level 4: Consistently curating high quality training is another huge challenge. There is no transparency in terms of quality data when it comes to curating experts. Are they engaging? Are they good facilitators? Will they fit my culture? It was clear that we needed to pilot every class before it ever makes it onto our platform - to ensure quality, we needed to understand from real people how interesting and impactful a session was and how they would describe that instructor. In addition to quality, most companies assume when you need corporate training, you need to find people called “corporate trainers.” Think of someone who you would love to learn from? They may not describe themselves as a corporate trainer. Outcome: redefine who can be a corporate trainer and collect data on every class instructors teach to provide the best recommendations to every customer.

Level 5: Recommendations are helpful, but they need to be attached to something bigger. There were certain recommendations in the early days that were easy to make. Your new managers are struggling? Here is a modern manager program. Your team wants to recognize Mental Health Awareness Month? Here are two timely classes. There was a deeper problem though as we went hunting. The learning was rarely connected to critical business outcomes. Our customers all have quarterly business goals, yet their learning was happening in a silo. Outcome: build an AI tool for People teams to input critical business goals, and quickly map those goals to skills needed and a learning strategy to achieve those critical goals. Connect people development to business outcomes.

I will stop at Level 5, but like any industry, there are so many more layers of problems that our team continues to hunt for within corporate learning: implementation of learning programs needs to be quick and easy, learners want to earn Certificates, analytics need to be in real time, post class learning nudges need to reinforce applications, and on and on.

There are always new problems to hunt and the closer you get to your customers the more hunting (and solving) you can do.

If you're company is not hunting for problems, that itself is a problem.

Moral: just as humans need food to survive, companies need problems to solve to survive. Problem hunting never ends. It’s a continuous search to be more helpful and provide more value to your customers.

And listening is the best way to problem hunt.?

The author, Brian Long, shares several practical tips in the book, but one of my favorites is to pause for 10 seconds during customer interviews. It will feel awkward, but that’s where the depth of the problem and the honesty starts to come out!?

In our case, we heard the customer sighs and the eye rolls of “corporate training is not engaging" on the surface level.

But it was the deeper levels of the problem that helped us understand live over async, content curation over content creation, changing who a corporate trainer can be, collecting instructor and class level data, and using learning and people development to drive business results.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and resist the temptation to solve a problem today.

Try problem hunting instead.