Pay attention to the awkward stuff
When you’re looking for problems worth solving, there’s a category of evidence that beats almost any survey, interview, or report.
Workarounds.
A workaround is the hack a user has invented to get a job done that no existing tool quite does properly. It’s the spreadsheet that should have been a product. The chain of copy-pastes. The shared doc held together by tradition. The hour every Friday they spend re-entering data.
Workarounds are valuable because they’re behaviour. Users have voted with their time, their attention, and sometimes their money, to solve a problem that nothing else solves cleanly.
Wherever you see one, there’s usually an opportunity nearby.
Why workarounds are such a strong signal
Most evidence of demand is verbal. Workarounds aren’t.
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