Problem Framing: Top 8 FAQs

Problem Framing is a business strategy tool that ensures you and your team are clear and aligned on a problem you're attempting to learn more about and potentially solve - before you begin thinking about solutions.

At New Haircut, we discovered the value of problem framing after several of our design sprints failed. Our sprints failed because of one or more of the following reasons:

• We were working on a problem that didn't align with company / stakeholder vision
• We were working on a problem the target market didn't care enough about, or already had good enough solutions for
• The team was unclear on the problem
• We didn't have the right people on the team, from within the company or external
• We didn't have the right users / customers to help validate our assumptions

We set out to improve or altogether eliminate these pitfalls from happening again. In doing so, we assembled a single-day, 9-step problem framing process that's rooted in design thinking.

Each step of our process allows for the appropriate conversation to open, visually share ideas, and close. The close of step 1 provides the opening for step 2, and so on. And at the conclusion, our framing process closes with a problem statement - a clearly articulate business challenge - which happens to be the exact opening required for practices like design sprints, or other prototyping and design processes.

Building this process has been an evolving, iterative journey over the past few years. Along the way, we've heard lots of great questions that have helped us continue to shape our arc. What follows are some of the best and most repeated questions we've heard.

At the end of this article, I share some information on our brand new Problem Framing Toolkit - a combination of training and do-it-yourself tools & templates for you to begin using.

Q1: When does problem framing happen in the overall design process?

Early.

Problem Framing is a business strategy tool that helps teams discover and define opportunities they're interested in learning more about and funding additional resources on.

These are critical conversations to have upfront, helping you decide if and how you want to go deeper, pivot, or stop, before any real time or budget has been consumed.

See Q3 below to learn more about what to consider doing prior to framing.

Q2: Who should be a part of problem framing?

People with authority, vision, expertise, and availability - primarily inside your company, but you can also invite 1 or 2 outside, trusted advisors / experts.

Influence: Because framing is a strategic conversation about tackling big, wicked, and (sometimes) new problems, you need people who can decide to run with the ideas generated during framing or kill them!

Vision: Folks with panoramic awareness of the industry, competition, company, stakeholders, and users / customers.

Experts: While vision is important for knowing what's happening around you, expertise is required within the theme or target problem space the group is curious about. If the target is defined or shifted during framing, you may need to recruit new / different folks to join the discussion.

Available: You'd be surprised how often you'll assemble a killer team, only to find out that one or more are not available or (more likely) only partially available. Which leads us to the last related point for this question...

To make sure you have the right people identified and selected, schedule 30-60 minute, one-on-one conversations with each team member about 1-2 weeks in advance. This is not only your chance to vet, but also learn about and incorporate their expectations and concerns.

Q3: What should I do to prepare for a problem framing workshop?

Organize yourself, your team, and your research.

Framing is most often used to explore company opportunities within a predefined theme (e.g. problem space, channel, customer segment, etc). This means it's important that there's a guiding vision that has executive sponsorship that will serve as the constraints and expectations to help focus the conversations. This vision may be set, for example, during quarterly / annual planning, a leadership meeting, or a north star workshop.

Otherwise, you may opt to use framing to drive your vision. In this case, the conversations and opportunity landscape are kept expansive and green field.

In either case, the facilitator and primary stakeholder should spend time before framing to gather enough research, establish expectations, assemble the team (see Q2), distribute research and pre-work assignments (1-3 weeks in advance), and take care of logistics (space, food, supplies).

Q4: Can problem framing be used outside of tech and digital products?

Yes.

Framing is a business strategy tool. If you're thinking about new ventures or rethinking existing ones and want to make sure the group is clear and aligned on the most important problem to begin the conversation around, framing is applicable.

While my background is in technology and digital product development, I've used framing to help discover opportunities related to consumer and business services, physical goods, and internal process improvements.

Just recently I worked with several major consumer brands who are committed to radically improving recycling. We used framing to identify and focus the group on the specific problem they could impact, and also had the resources to do so. While there may be downstream products & services created, framing helped us define a mission - one that spanned several industries, dozens of stakeholder companies, and billions of humans.

Q5: We run design sprints. Do I still need problem framing?

Probably.

Design sprints are amazing at helping you rapidly test solutions to a problem you're trying to tackle. However, sprints won't tell you upfront if you're tackling a good problem. In other words, you may not find out that your sprint is attempting to solve a problem that doesn't need solving until you're several sprints in. And even if you make that discovery during your first sprint, you've now anchored your project with a false start. This doesn't leave the best taste in the mouths of team members and stakeholders.

By separating problem validation from solution validation, framing provides you with a fast, highly structured method for deciding what to sprint on, and what not to.

Framing also arms you with relevant research and artifacts to bring into your sprint. And because framing is visual, your framing artifacts can be shared before and during your sprint - much more powerful and contextual for those joining your sprint. The alternative is to have someone start your sprint by standing up and telling the group what the challenge is, leaving room for lots of ambiguity and bias.

As a result of the additional insights framing provides, many of our ensuing design sprints now only span 2 or 3 days. More on this in Q6.

The opposite is also true. While problem framing and design sprints pair well together, framing is and can be run as its own isolated activity or in conjunction with processes other than a design sprint.

Q6: How does problem framing change the activities within a design sprint?

It eliminates certain activities or provides additional context - particularly during a sprint's Understand phase.

For example, during a standard sprint, upfront you define your sprint questions. However, because the team isn't yet clear on the current experience, target problem they want to solve, or who (user / customer) to focus on, your sprint questions are somewhat uninformed.

Our framing process helps you identify and zoom in on the most impacted human and their current experience of navigating the problem space. We define our Personas and develop Experience Maps, which we bring into our sprints. This not only provides important context for those joining your sprint, but provides helpful constraints around your sprint goals and questions.

For our design sprints, we bring a wall-sized, printed version of the Experience Map from framing. We invite the sprint team to review and build upon the map.

Q7: Your process is 9 steps and takes 1 day. Is there a shorter version?

Yes, and.

Time and availability need to be weighed into everything we do - whether it's a piece of work you're delivering, a meeting you're organizing, or a workshop you're designing.

Our problem framing workshop contains 9 steps and can be completed in a single day; in 6-8 hours. This is our gold standard format. (To be clear, there is pre-work that needs to happen to set your framing up for success - see Q3.) Sometimes, this format won't fit into your agenda, timeline, or team availability. So you'll need to be flexible.

You can, and might want to, split it up into 2 consecutive days. This is especially true if you're running framing remotely, with a distributed team (more in Q8). If you do split framing into separate sessions, aim for a max duration of 2 days. And try to avoid placing days in between, unless you need to conduct additional research.

In the shortest and most aggressive scenario, you can do framing inside of 30 minutes by asking each person to individually state the problem they believe the team should be focused on. You can then affinity map, brainstorm, and/or vote your way toward a unified problem statement.

And still, framing is a conversation about big topics that your team might spend months, maybe years, working on. That is to say, be careful trading hours in your framing workshop for, potentially, weeks of downstream rework.

In fact, just last night, someone I'd never spoken with wrote me this note:

"I have such a wicked story of a client who just killed a project that was the definition of trying to solve the wrong problem. We estimate they sunk around 1 million into the project before killing it. Ouch."

Q8: My team is distributed. Will problem framing work virtually?

Yes.

One of my very first problem framing sessions was virtual. Because I poorly planned, at the last second I learned that a couple team members would be "dialing in." Ugh.

Too late to reschedule, I ported my day's worth of activities into a digital whiteboard within Mural. What I had budgeted to complete in 6 hours, took us 4. Also surprising, when the conversations circled around delicate topics, the team summoned their vulnerability - there was something about having a screen separating them that they felt safer than usual. A case of internet muscles maybe?!

So yes, not only can problem framing be done across distributed teams, but sometimes it's the better option. For example, when working with teams who are familiar with me and one another, I may push to do framing virtually to reduce scheduling delays and travel budgets.

My go-to tools that I've used for virtual framing include Mural, Zoom, Slack, and Drive. My max duration for a single session is 3-4 hours. If I think or see that we're going to need more time, I split my workshop into 2 consecutive days.

Have other questions you want me to cover? Leave them in the comments!

Getting started with problem framing

I think one of the reasons design sprints took the world by storm is how beautifully simple they are. Leading teams through the problem space has been, for me, more challenging. It took me several attempts to feel comfortable with our pre-existing process, and then begin to change it to better suit my facilitation style and the needs of the teams I was supporting.

To help eliminate or reduce those pains for you, and get you up-and-running facilitating your own problem framing workshops, I just launched New Haircut's Problem Framing Toolkit.

Think of the toolkit as a combination of training plus all of the do-it-yourself tools and templates needed to organize and lead your problem framing workshops.

Inside the toolkit is everything I've learned and incorporated over the past few years - hundreds of hours of work and ideation. When I run problem framing, I use what's inside this toolkit. That means, as I continue to learn and iterate my practice, the toolkit will continue to be updated.

If you're serious about changing the conversation inside your organization to identify problems worth solving, I invite you to put our toolkit to work for you.