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.