Solve the problem. do not solve the problem.

An engineer is naturally fond of solving problems, especially the bugs in his system. As long as a problem occurs, he wants to solve it. It seems that the more problems he can solve, the more value he can create. Such logic may be right in the development and maintenance of software for enterprises, but it is almost the most important reason to kill entrepreneurs in the consumer market.

　　Value of the problem

According to the definition, the value of each problem is different. Some problems are very painful for consumers (cancer, oxygen), and some are no big deal (bruises, odor ). Some problems are very serious for some people (there is no umbrella in rainy days), but not big for others (there is no umbrella in sunny days ). Since entrepreneurship is creating value, from this perspective, we should not solve the problem without difference.

　　Opportunity Cost

More importantly, the resources of entrepreneurial teams are actually very limited, from manpower, money, time, patience to determination. Therefore, compared with large enterprises, you are not qualified to solve every immediate problem-if you have more than one solution, you will have less chance. This is like going to a playground. The currency tokens on your hand are limited. Of course, you cannot play with every machine.

　　Valuable comments

When it comes to solving the problem, the most common situation is "listening too often to consumers"-strangely, isn't Jamie asking us to listen to the voice of the market? Well, this is actually like "Listening to mom. Of course you want to listen, but not all, right? The biggest fear of a software product is to help everyone solve all the problems, because eventually it is equal to helping no one solve the problem. This is the result of listening to consumers.

　　Everyone can solve the problem, but not everyone knows what to solve.

According to the definition, there are so many engineers in the world that all problems should be solved theoretically. But the reality is that we still have a lot of pain in our lives. Why? The answer is actually very simple, because in the training of engineers, we are only taught how to solve the problem and use the most efficient, logical, and large-scale method, but from start to end, in fact, no one has taught us a more important thing, that is, how to identify and which problems are most worth solving. Therefore, the failure of most entrepreneurial teams is not a solution. They often fail because they spend too much time on issues that are not worth solving.

　　Which issues should be solved?

Therefore, as an entrepreneur, the focus is not to hone your ability to solve problems, but to determine which problems should be solved. In your limited time, if you cannot solve a very painful problem, you will have very little chance of success. That is to say, you should not spend too much time on the bugs, but on the bugs that blocks core user experience.

In the same sense, teams usually spend too little time on getting started and using interfaces, because when you open the statistics, generally, more than half of users have left your website before they have experienced core features. Registration is especially the most common obstacle. before verifying core issues, why should we build a high-wall user out of the door?

All in all, you must remember that almost all entrepreneurial teams have strong problem-solving skills, but in the end, the true distinction between success and failure is actually just your ability to find the right question. Therefore, before you follow the engineer's intuition to solve the next bug and the next problem, do you really want to know what you should do?