Framing a verifiable customer problem

A founding team arrives with a seemingly finished idea: “a subscription for healthy meals for shift workers.” That sentence names a solution and a sales mechanism before the team knows what the worker cannot do today. At this stage, the specialist's job is to make the underlying problem observable. If the team builds subscription software and later learns that workers can buy food but cannot receive a delivery during a shift, it has spent effort on the wrong constraint. A useful problem statement allows a colleague to find relevant people, ask about recent events, and decide what evidence would challenge the idea.

A customer problem is a situation in which a particular person repeatedly encounters a consequential obstacle despite the alternatives available now. Describe the situation before describing a product. Identify who performs the task, when the difficulty arises, what the person does instead, what that alternative costs in money or effort, and who decides whether to pay. Early answers are hypotheses. The user and buyer may be different: the employer could pay for a worker's meal, or the worker could pay directly. Those are different business arrangements, even when the meal itself looks identical. Stated interest in “healthy food” also differs from an order placed at a specific time, and neither proves that a worksite will permit delivery.

Consider a fictional building that operates around the clock. The founder has had informal conversations with three staff members. One finishes at 2 a.m.; the cafeteria closes before midnight. She brought food from home twice last week and bought fast food once. A second can order through an existing delivery app, but the driver cannot enter the building, so collecting the order requires ten minutes away from his station. A third prefers home-prepared food and has no intention of buying a prepared meal. These three accounts are neither a representative sample nor a market-size estimate. The first points to availability at the relevant hour; the second points to pickup access. The third is a contrary case that blocks the statement that all shift workers want the service. None has yet paid for the proposed offer.

Write a short problem card with four parts: a defined segment, a specific occasion, the present alternative, and an observable consequence or unknown. One draft reads: “Workers in Building X whose shifts continue after the cafeteria closes bring food from home or leave their stations to collect it. We need to learn how often the existing options fail, for whom, and whether access to a usable pickup point is the central constraint.” The card does not assume a subscription, claim that delivery is permitted, or turn three interviews into a percentage. A practical next action is to interview people on different shifts about recent meals and ask the authorized worksite representative about pickup rules before offering a pilot. The rule check is an operational dependency, not legal advice.

Keep the current alternative visible because a new venture competes with what people already do, including doing nothing. Home-prepared food may be cheaper and preferable. The cafeteria may serve the early part of a shift. Delivery may already work for staff who can leave their stations. The number of employees in a building is therefore not the number of potential paying customers. The U.S. Small Business Administration's planning guidance treats demand, location, pricing, and existing alternatives as distinct market-research questions and distinguishes existing data from direct customer research. That guidance supplies a method, not evidence that the fictional meal venture has demand. For this venture, the team needs local behavioral evidence.

The card should also expose what would change the direction of work. If interviews show that pickup rules are the binding obstacle, a permitted handoff may matter more than recipe variety. If staff will not pay at a workable price, or the team cannot deliver safely at that hour, the right decision may be to stop or redesign the test. A specialist should not bury these possibilities under the word “validation.” Three common formulations fail the test. “Everyone is busy and needs convenience” does not specify whom to interview. “Customers love our meals” claims acceptance before a sale and puts the product inside the problem. “The building has one thousand employees, so we have one thousand customers” confuses an addressable headcount with people who face the occasion and choose to pay. A good card is an investigation tool rather than a polished advertisement.