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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Why workarounds are one of your best signals