• Problems, Problems

    Posted on January 5th, 2012 by and currently 0 commenting.

    What would you say if someone wanted to engage your agency in a project around finding and sharing recipes? Of course it would include a website component, a mobile app, etc. With Facebook integration it would have the potential become a part of people’s lives…

    I had a conversation along similar lines recently, and it led me to ask some interesting questions. Here are a few I can remember:

    • What would you be offering people that they can’t already get using any number of the existing sources (including communities)?
    • Is your idea good enough to compete with Google’s utility as a ‘recipe finding app’?
    • If you want to jump into the content competition, do you have the time, money, expertise and creative firepower to bring something remarkable to the table?
    • What problem will your ‘recipe app’ actually solve?

    There it is. It’s been rolling around in my head a lot lately: “What problem are we solving?”

    The question came up again this recently when someone told me about their experience judging entries for a marketing competition: “You just wouldn’t believe it. So many of these entries are simply about how the agency increased the number of Facebook fans on a brand’s page. Is that what agencies do these days?”

    Here’s a really great quote from scientist Richard Hamming on solving problems in the field of science (1):

    If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.

    In 2012 I am going to consistently ask what problems I’m solving, and I’m going to keep my eye on wondering how to attack them.

    • (1) You can read the transcript of Richard Hamming’s speech here.