Module 3.3: Create Problems (aka Let Users Break It)

Most StartUp founders implement artificial barriers that create friction in adoption, restrict wild usage, limits the extraordinary and prevents the feedback loop into your roadmap, iteration or pivot.

The Create Problems workbook helps founders understand that their idea is not fully formed and the path to PMF is to let users break, experiment, gravitate and your capability as a founder to see the signals.

What’s Inside:

1. Contrarian Mindset: Founders must work out how to see outside the fishbowl, to try and see outside your own confirmation bias, to fight against your own vision arrogance. Frameworks mean nothing if you don’t have the humility and ability to see and act on the signals and understand what this means for your product, your users, and ultimately your company.
2. Artificial Barriers: Identifying and removing unnecessary restrictions, frictions, or constraints that limit user adoption, engagement, or experimentation that you have likely self-created.
3. Break The Machine: Actively encourage and enable users to interact with your product in unexpected ways, pushing its boundaries and limitations to uncover hidden potential.
4. See The Signals: Implement robust monitoring and analytics practices to gain observability into how users interact with your product and uncover invaluable insights.
5. Read The Tea Leaves: Have the capability (and humility) to actively seek out and understand what you are seeing, both qualitative and quantitative, to derive actionable insights.
6. Profit From It: Everyday is day one. Observe, Understand, Iterate, Release. Relentlessly focus on delivering user value or leads to an iteration or pivot.

Download the Create Problems workbook and start learning to let your users break your system to reveal the signals.

Access the Create Problems workbook:

Why Founders Should Care:

• Worried your product may be creating artificial barriers and frictions for users that limit usage, adoption, and the capability for users to break the system?
• Struggling to understand the extraordinary potential for growth and innovation that comes from allowing users to explore and push the boundaries of your product?
• Need to develop the contrarian mindset to see outside your own biases and respond to the signals that matter to your users and your company?

The Create Problems workbook helps you:

1. Identify and remove unnecessary frictions and constraints that stifle growth and restrict how users interact with your product.
2. Actively encourage users to explore, experiment with and push your product to the limits in a managed manner to uncover opportunities for innovation.
3. Implement robust monitoring and analytics practices to gain deep observability into how users are using (and breaking) your product to extract insights.
4. Cultivate the humility and capability to understand what you’re seeing and act decisively on new learnings, whether it means iteration or a “using it wrong” pivot.
5. Develop a relentless “day one” mentality focused on delivering continuous value for users based on data-driven market insights and feedback.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why artificial barriers kill adoption, engagement, and experimentation, and why founders often create them in the first place.
• Specific techniques for encouraging users to explore and push the boundaries of what your product can do.
• Approaches for monitoring and analyzing user interaction with your product, both quantitative and qualitative, to uncover valuable insights.
• Strategies for reading the signals in user data that indicate an opportunity for product enhancement or a potential pivot.
• Frameworks for translating new learnings and insights into continuous iteration and delivery of customer value.
• Mindset shifts required to embrace the uncertainty and change that comes from truly letting users guide your product development.

By completing this module, you’ll gain the courage and capability to embrace a new mindset – one where you actively seek out, rather than fear, the unexpected ways in which users will interact with your product. You’ll learn to see outside your own biases, to fight against your own vision arrogance, and to pull the signals from the noise that will guide your product to PMF. Most importantly, you’ll realize that your idea is never fully baked, and that the path to success lies in your ability to let users break it, and to listen to what that breakage is telling you.