Design Thinking : Reverse Engineering your Customer's Problems

I’ve noticed a few posts here on Indie Hackers referring to the issue with getting your first customers, having already built a product or SaaS offering. Building a product or service before conducting adequate customer discovery is something I’ve done myself in the past that has left me wondering if I have made something that is not really solving a problem.

In our eagerness to build, sometimes we forget to ask if there is really a market for the problem we think we are solving.

Sometimes it helps to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and try to solve the problems they are actually encountering. Design thinking is a great way to help us do that.

How does it work?

Design thinking is a solution based approach to problem solving. It forces us to think about the human at the other end of the interaction. We can then reverse engineer our solution based on this input and work towards a better product market fit.

We don’t want to assume that the idea in our head is going to be the solution to all of their problems.

People are at the heart of every business. Understanding human nature, especially in decision making, will help us to build out more robust solutions and businesses. Utilizing Design thinking as a way to gather feedback from potential customers and iterating your solution accordingly is a great exercise.

This feedback loop and reverse engineering from the customer’s perspective is something that “hackers” including myself often forget.

This is just your daily reminder.

Is this something you’ve struggled with before?