Hello learners!
Welcome to the fifth day of the series 30 Days of PM by Crework! Till now we have covered the basics of Product Management and have started a deeper dive recently. Continuing on that, we will be discussing a very important and famous framework.
Before we move forward though, lemme remind you that if you are not a subscriber, please make sure you subscribe to us and complete the challenge.
Cool then, let’s go!
Where’s the problem? 🔫
If you have been paying attention, you would remember that since the last 4 days I have been saying the same thing - understand your users, address their desires or solve a problem in their life that they really care about.
One of the reason I am repeating it so frequently is that because many product managers and even product leaders don’t really understand their users well, or at least their problems. One very simple reason behind that is - “It’s hard to discover problems”.
To understand problems, you need to do a few things. Talk to users, understand your users, understand their goals and their current process of doing things. Even after doing all this, you cannot be sure if you have identified a real problem or not.
So, if it’s so hard to find and understand problems, how should we do it? Well, we use the “5 Whys” framework.
5 Why is a framework that is used to do root cause analysis, find underlying user motivations, problems, and pain points, and eventually understand their decision-making process.
It is an iterative approach to uncovering the root of a problem. It encourages you to dig deeper into surface-level problems in order to figure out the underlying issue.
5 Why, but how?
This framework works on a very simple principle - You just keep on asking why and you will discover much deeper problems.
By repeatedly asking the question “Why” (five is a good rule of thumb), you can peel away the layers of symptoms which can lead to the root cause of a problem.
Also, why 5? You can ask any number of whys until you reach the root cause. 5 is just an indicative number, sometimes 3 whys might be enough, while other times you might have to ask more than 5 whys to get to the issue.
I know, it’s hard to imagine, so let’s go through some examples.
Problem Statemen: Users are experiencing frequent crashes and slow performance in a web application.
Why? – The application’s server storage is insufficient.
Why? – The server infrastructure was not scaled up to meet increasing user demands.
Why? – There was no proactive monitoring and performance optimization of the server infrastructure.
Why? – The operations team did not have visibility into the growing user base.
Why? – There is no mechanism in place to provide real-time user growth data to the operations team.
Root Cause: The absence of proactive monitoring and lack of visibility into user growth prevented timely scaling of the server infrastructure, resulting in poor app performance.
Solution: Implement real-time user growth tracking and establish proactive monitoring processes to ensure a scalable and performant application.
Issue: Server crashed again
Why? - Maybe because we pushed a new API to the server recently
Why? - Because we launched a new feature, it probably didn’t use the API correctly
Why? - We have a new engineer who doesn’t know how to use that API
Why? - Because we never trained him to use it
Why? - Because the manager wanted to get him on production asap with minimal training and was only given a few days to get familiar with the existing code base.
So, here we found that the server crashing might be caused by the new feature/API, but the real cause is an untrained engineer.
What else?
I hope the examples above are more than enough to convey what exactly the 5 Why framework is and how you can use it to get to the root cause of the problem.
Let’s talk about some of the best practices while applying this framework:
You need to listen more and talk less while asking questions.
You should formulate some open-ended Why questions.
Be ready to challenge the assumptions: Encourage critical thinking and challenge assumptions throughout the process. This helps you avoid jumping to conclusions and ensures a thorough exploration of potential causes.
Iterate and Refine: The 5 Whys is an iterative process. As you uncover root causes, re-evaluate and refine your questions to ensure you’re getting to the deepest level of causality. This may involve revisiting earlier answers to further investigate or validate the findings.
Day 5 ✅
Congratulations on completing the fifth day of the series. 🥳 You should be proud of yourself.
Now, you know what to do. Share your learnings with everyone and stay accountable.
If you have any feedback, please share that with us. We would love to have your feedback and improve the future content for your better learning.
References: