You’ve shipped the thing. The strategy made sense. The business case held up. The team executed flawlessly.
And yet, it isn’t landing. Adoption is flat. Engagement tails off. The stakeholders who signed it off are already onto the next initiative, while the people it was built for are politely ignoring it.
The instinct at this point is to audit the execution. The messaging wasn’t clear enough. The rollout was botched. The UX needs another pass. Sometimes that’s true. But before you spend another quarter optimizing the surface, there is a harder question worth asking:
Was the problem you set out to solve actually one that anyone was going to change their behavior to solve?
Not whether it was a “real” problem. Not whether the data supported it. But whether it carried enough behavioral weight that someone, somewhere, was going to do something differently because of what you built.
Most of the time, when a sound piece of work doesn’t land, that’s the gap. Not execution. Not the solution. The problem-definition itself was the wrong shape.
The Three Forces of Misdiagnosis
Smart, well-resourced organizations misdiagnose their own problems for three compounding reasons:
- Internal Coherence vs. External Validity: If the logic chains together in a slide deck, it feels like success. But coherence inside the building and relevance outside it are two different tests. Most strategy work passes the first and never runs the second.
- The Proximity Gap: Talking to actual users is slow and politically inconvenient when there’s a deadline. As discovery shrinks, the problem becomes abstract—and abstract problems produce abstract solutions.
- Political Gravity: In the absence of fresh evidence, the loudest internal voice wins. The definition of the problem becomes whatever is most convenient for the org chart, not the customer.
Case Study: Mistaking a Friction Crisis for an Existential One
A SaaS business I worked with was chasing an ambitious 20% growth target while their “bread and butter” platform—the engine of the company—was drowning in customer complaints and internal escalations.
The Internal Diagnosis: Leadership was convinced the platform was a “legacy” dead end. They believed the spike in complaints meant customers were on the verge of jumping ship to a competitor. The strategy? Shift investment away from the core and pivot immediately to forging entirely new products. They were ready to abandon their foundation to chase the “next big thing.”
The External Reality: When we actually spoke to their largest clients, the truth was the exact opposite: They didn’t want to leave; they were desperate to stay.
- Users hadn’t outgrown the product; they were just tired of fighting it.
- One client described the interface as “looking like Outlook from the 1990s.” * Major customers were building massive, manual workarounds in spreadsheets just to avoid using the platform’s UI.
The “existential crisis” was actually a Friction Crisis. The business was about to spend millions building “new” solutions that nobody asked for, while abandoning the very tool their customers relied on most. The escalations weren’t a signal of obsolescence—they were a signal of essentiality. People only complain this loudly about things they actually need to use.
The lesson: No amount of “innovation” can fix a failure to address the basic friction of your core service.
The “External Reality” Litmus Test
If you suspect you are solving the wrong problem, run your initiative against these four questions:
- Where are the workarounds? If users have invented their own “hacky” version of a solution, they have a real problem. If they haven’t, you’re likely solving a friction they don’t actually feel.
- What is the cost of doing nothing? If a user stays with their current habit, does it actually hurt them? If the answer is “not much,” you lack the urgency required to drive adoption.
- When was your last “unstructured” conversation? If it’s been more than three months since you sat with a user in their actual context—without a sales pitch—you are running on assumptions.
- The Vocabulary Test: If you stripped your project to a one-sentence problem statement, would a customer recognize it as their own? The further the language drifts from their reality, the more the definition has failed.
What You Can Do From Your Seat
Improving problem definition doesn’t require a permission slip from the C-suite:
- Have one real conversation this week. Fifteen minutes. Ask open questions and shut up. Close the proximity gap.
- Ask the “Behavior” question. In your next meeting, ask: “What evidence do we have that this matters enough to the users that they will change their behavior for it?” * Bring the “Outside” in. Share one specific quote or workaround from a customer in every strategy session. Make the absence of external evidence visible so the loudest internal framing isn’t the only voice in the room.
The High Cost of Being Confidently Wrong
The numbers are staggering. McKinsey found that 94% of executives are dissatisfied with their innovation performance. Harvard Business School notes that 75% of venture-backed startups fail—mostly because they built solutions to problems that didn’t drive enough urgency to change behavior.
Execution doesn’t fail at a 90% rate. Problem definition does.
If you suspect the next initiative is going to land softly because the problem is the wrong shape, name it. Internal coherence is never a substitute for external validity.
Move from Definition to Action
If this describes a challenge you’re currently facing, my book Actions for Innovation goes much deeper. It provides the specific tools for surfacing what’s really worth solving and building alignment across teams so you can stop optimizing the surface and start solving the right problems.
[Link to Actions for Innovation]