Good Problems to Solve
One of many(!) inline cable adjusters from Jagwire
Inspiration (or requirements) can come from a lot of places. One of the most important things for a product manager is to be sure they’re paying attention to the right ideas — the ones that will move the needle for their business the most.
I wrote recently that some of the founders I’ve worked with were among the best product people I’ve known — full of ideas for solving the problems they encountered as they moved through the world. And I bet most product folks have no difficulty coming up with solutions to problems they run into at work or in their personal activities. This is a great skill that can also pretty easily become a trap: When you’re able to see problems everywhere and devise solutions, it can be hard to remember that not all problems are worth solving.
I have big and little product ideas all the time, to solve issues I run into in products in my portfolio and in my personal life. I’m a cyclist and a bike mechanic, and in the process of building up bicycles I often run into little things I need to work around. For example, I once created a spacer from a bit of brass that allowed a 1990’s Japanese (Shimano) derailleur to sit properly on a 1970’s French (Huret) dropout, so that it could be adjusted properly and run silently on a bike that wasn’t designed to support it. I’ve built a platform to securely support a pizza box on top of a bike basket so I could carry a stack of pies home flat (if a little shaken). My best idea was an inline cable adjuster. This one allowed me to keep the brakes adjusted on a build where I used a set of brake levers with no adjuster barrels with brake calipers that also had no adjusters, on a frame that also had no provision for an adjuster in the rear brake cable routing. Of all the bits I’ve cobbled together, only that one has ever appeared later in the form of a commercial solution. Meaning it was the only one where the problem was common enough that a business (eventually several) decided to productize something similar to my solution.
For me, that’s great reinforcement for a hard Product truth: It’s not enough to create clever solutions for customer or internal problems — we have to do the hard work of figuring out which problems are the right ones to solve, for whom, and when. When I made my inline cable adjuster thirty years ago, I first tried to find a commercial part at a couple of local bike shops and online, but I wasn’t able to. Back then it still wasn’t easy to find seemingly anything with a Google or Amazon search. Ten years later I needed to solve the same problem (for a trailer bike build to ride with my daughter), and I did find a commercial option online. I ended up buying a pair — one for the trailer bike and one more to replace the one I’d made years before. Since I could only find one option, the demand seems likely still to have been from hobbyists and bike shops trying to solve one-off problems. But when I was writing this blog post, I did a quick search and found many options available from different manufacturers, including Shimano (one of the biggest component makers out there), and several options from Jagwire (like the simple black ones at top).
So how did we go from me not being able to find a solution at all, to finding one solution a decade later, to having ample choices today? What changed? The use case certainly didn’t. The products are all fundamentally similar, so it doesn’t seem like there was some transformative innovation along the way. No, if in 2024 we’re now awash in inline cable adjusters, it must be because something fundamentally changed in the demand picture for these parts. In other words, it’s the market that changed, not the problem or the solution.
Bicycle component manufacturers care about selling millions of units per year to bike manufacturers, not hundreds or even thousands to hobbyists. My guess is that at some point bike manufacturers started asking for cable adjustment solutions for at least two reasons:
To gain some flexibility to mix and match parts
To take some cost out of the frame manufacturing process
If they can splice an adapter into the brake cable housing, the manufacturers don’t need to worry about having adjusters on the frame, the brake levers, or the calipers, which makes brake levers, brake calipers, and frames cheaper to make and buy. Moving the adjustment to the cable housing also lets them mix and match parts more readily to increase their leverage over suppliers, source alternatives in the face of shortages, and further drive down costs. Assuming that’s correct, at some point the target buyer and the volume of demand changed dramatically, and when that happened the problem went from being not so interesting to becoming a good one to solve.
In the B2B software world, the product teams will get no shortage of requirements (and solutions) from engagements with customers, internal stakeholders, salespeople, leadership, competitors, analysts, and others. And it’s easy to look at these lists and get excited about making your product better — even the best, most usable product in the category. The hard truth is that most of these problems probably don’t really need to be solved because though they may provide some value, they won’t move the needle very much in terms of the competitiveness, stickiness, ease of use, or overall business value of your product. This is not at all to say that product managers should ignore their customers or stakeholders, rather that there should be a high bar for moving something out of the backlog and onto the roadmap.
The best problems to solve are the ones for which you can construct a clear business case: Important problems that will drive new revenue, secure existing revenue, lower costs, drive growth, lift NPV or customer sat scores, or otherwise clearly align with whatever your organization’s key measures of success are today. Anything else may not be a good problem to solve right now, even if the solution seems cool, useful, even popular.
As always, thanks for reading.
J
