Luka Modrić scores on a free kick just a couple of hours before turning 39… 27th goal for Croatia on 180th appearance

Luka becomes the 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝-𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 with 180 caps, just behind Cristiano (213).

This makes sense because of how these teams are typically organized — not as true product teams, but as project teams. They are given an output goal and only make decisions within the bounds of that output. Since decisions about the form factor are typically made for them by executive stakeholders — like that customer’s CEO — they skip right to the form factor.

The road to the Build Trap is paved with product problems
The build trap is when organizations focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce. — Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap

They say that good designers fall in love with problems, not with solutions. I tend to agree, and the first thing I always ask new customers to do is describe the problem they are facing.

A couple of years back, a customer came to me with a request: “Our CEO tried to use our product. His transaction didn’t go through and he couldn’t see its status. So customers being able to track their transaction is a priority problem that we need to solve.”

This was hardly the only time that a customer’s first stab at a problem statement ended up defining a product problem. In fact, the majority of initial problem statements I see are some twist on “we want to add this feature, can you help us define it.”

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning but anyone can start today and make a new ending.

sure you’ve already spotted the snag: the problem in their statement was “users don’t have this tool.”

In other words, it was a solution statement in disguise.

But we couldn’t convince the customer’s CEO to change it. He “fell in love” with the problem of not having a tracker. After two years of bashing away at the problem without moving the metrics, the customer’s team realized what we had told them in the first week: that they were trying to solve a product problem rather than a customer problem.

This kind of work is commonly dismissed as UX theater — and rightly so — but it can certainly feel like research to inexperienced practitioners. After all, the PMs talked to customers, and gathered feedback and feature ideas, which they used to create a roadmap and then a prioritized backlog. What more could you want?

But the features delivered from that backlog will all contribute to the user experience rot, because they build on a premise of solving the product problem of “missing features” rather than the customer problem of not being able to reach their goals.

Memorize ur bank account number, so u can send it immediately someone asks while on a phonecall; Tell the person u have sent it before the call ends. Delay is dangerous.

They are solving product problems.

When low-maturity product teams do engage with outcome goals, the situation is rarely much better. Vanity metrics such as number of queries or email send rate predominate, locking product teams into their most highly instrumented form factor rather than allowing them to choose the most appropriate channel for reaching the customer