Introduction: The "Solution in Search of a Problem" Trap
You have an idea. It probably started with a spark of technology. Maybe you were reading about the latest advances in large language models, real-time data streaming, or computer vision. You connected that technology to a problem you think you understand, and suddenly, the entire product vision unfolds in your mind. It’s brilliant. It’s elegant. It’s a game-changer.
You get excited. You mock up designs. You talk to developers. You start coding. You fall in love with the beautiful complexity of what you’re building. You're so focused on the how—on the intricate dance of features and functions—that you forget to ask the most important question: why?
This is the most dangerous place for an entrepreneur to be. It's the "Solution in Search of a Problem" trap, and it’s the unmarked graveyard where countless startups, mountains of venture capital, and years of human effort go to die. It’s the story of the beautifully engineered juicer that requires proprietary packets and is more hassle than just squeezing an orange. It's the story of the blockchain-based supply chain solution pitched to companies that barely have a functioning inventory database.
You're building something, but are you solving anything?
The hard truth is that customers don't care about your technology. They don't buy products because they use AI or because they're built on a novel architecture. They "hire" products to get a job done. If your beautiful, complex solution doesn't get that job done better, cheaper, or more easily than their current workaround—even if that workaround is a messy spreadsheet and three weekly meetings—it will fail.
But what if you could de-risk your idea before you write a single line of code? What if you could stress-test the very foundation of your concept to see if it’s built on solid rock or shifting sand?
This article will give you a framework to do just that. It's a pre-ideation process designed to force you to think from the future-back. It's about elevating your thinking before you get bogged down in features. It's about making sure the problem you're solving is real, substantial, and worth your time and money. It's about avoiding the trap of building a better version of something nobody really wanted in the first place.
Why Your Current Ideation Process is Broken: The Abstraction Ladder
The core of the problem lies in where you start your thinking. Most founders start on the bottom rung of what we'll call the "Abstraction Ladder."
Let's say you're a tool company. The lowest-abstraction thinking is, "Let's make a better drill bit. We can use a stronger metal, make it spin 10% faster." You’ll enter a crowded market and fight over marginal gains.
If you climb one rung up the ladder, you start thinking about the immediate job: "The customer needs to make a hole." Now your thinking expands. Maybe the solution isn't a drill bit at all, but a high-pressure water jet or a laser. Better, but still limited.
But what happens if you climb to the very top of the ladder? You ask, "What is the real, higher-order job the customer is trying to get done?" The customer probably doesn't want a hole. They want to hang a shelf. But why do they want to hang a shelf? They want to display a family photo. And why that? Because they want to feel a sense of warmth and connection in their home.
The higher-order job isn't making a hole; it's creating a comfortable living space.
When you frame the problem at that level, the entire universe of possible solutions explodes. Maybe the innovation isn't a better drill at all. Maybe it's a service that hangs things for you. Maybe it's digital picture frames that don't require hanging. Maybe it's 3M Command Strips—an incredibly successful innovation that got the job of "hanging a picture" done with zero holes, no tools, and no spackle. It got the job done by obfuscating the lower-level work.
The ultimate goal of a breakthrough innovation is to get the job done completely, and this almost always results in a solution with fewer visible features and steps for the user. Think about the move from manual transmissions to automatic, or from command-line interfaces to graphical user interfaces. The underlying complexity might increase, but the user-facing complexity plummets.
By starting your ideation on the bottom rung, you're anchoring yourself to a specific solution and fighting for inches of improvement. To find true breakthroughs, you have to force yourself to climb the ladder before you commit to an idea.
Introducing "Pre-Concepts": Your Future-Back Framing Tool
So, how do you do this systematically? How do you force your brain to climb that ladder when it's so tempting to stay on the ground floor building things?
The answer is a thought experiment I call "Pre-Concepts."
Pre-Concepts are hypothetical, future-state scenarios you design specifically to stress-test your understanding of the problem space. You create them before you do deep customer research, before you build a JTBD model, and certainly before you write any code. Their entire purpose is to establish the "guardrails" for what a truly breakthrough innovation needs to look like. They are your tools for thinking from the future-back.
There are three Pre-Concepts you should always develop.
The "Magic Wand" Concept: Defining Perfection
First, imagine you could give your customer a magic wand. If they could wave it and have their Job-to-be-Done completed instantly, perfectly, and with zero effort on their part, what would that outcome look like?
It's crucial that you don't let them wish for your product. They can't say, "I wish for a better dashboard." That's cheating. The magic wand grants the outcome, not the means.
If the job is managing a project, the magic wand doesn't create a Gantt chart; it delivers a completed project, on time, on budget, with a happy team and a delighted client.
If the job is diagnosing a patient's illness, the magic wand doesn't provide a list of potential diseases; it provides a definitive diagnosis and the optimal treatment plan instantly.
If the job is feeding your family, the magic wand doesn't generate a meal plan; it materializes a delicious, healthy, and satisfying meal on the table that everyone loves.
The "Magic Wand" concept is your North Star for a perfect solution. It defines the endpoint of innovation for that job. Any new idea you come up with can be measured against it: how much closer does your idea get the customer to this state of magic?
The "No-Tech" Concept: Finding the Timeless Need
Next, you go in the complete opposite direction. How would someone get this job done with no modern technology? How did they do it 50, or even 500, years ago?
This thought experiment is incredibly powerful because it strips away all the layers of technology and process we take for granted and reveals the fundamental, timeless human need at the core of the job.
How did a Roman general manage a complex military campaign without project management software? Through a rigid hierarchy of command, trusted messengers, and simple, clear daily orders. The core job was about establishing clarity, trust, and communication.
How did a merchant in the 15th century assess creditworthiness without credit scores? Through reputation, social networks, and personal relationships. The core job was about assessing trust and risk within a community.
How did a family pass down recipes before the internet? Through handwritten notes and oral tradition, passed from one generation to the next. The core job was about preserving and transferring knowledge within a trusted context.
The "No-Tech" concept unearths the foundational pillars of the job. It forces you to see that the job is often more about human dynamics—communication, trust, risk, learning—than it is about data processing or automation.
The "System-Level" Concept: Changing the Game
Finally, ask yourself: What if the solution wasn't a product or a tool at all, but a change in the system, the process, or the business model?
This moves your thinking outside the box of "a thing I can sell" and into the realm of disruptive innovation. Often, the most powerful way to get a job done better is to change the context in which the job is performed.
To help people eat healthier, what if you didn't create a new food product, but instead worked with employers to change their cafeteria menus and subsidize healthy options? That’s a system-level change.
To help teams collaborate better, what if you didn't build another communication app, but instead introduced a new meeting format like a silent meeting or a daily stand-up that eliminates the need for long status reports? That's a process innovation.
To help people afford home ownership, what if you didn't just offer another mortgage product, but created a new co-ownership or rent-to-own model? That's a business model innovation.
The "System-Level" concept challenges the assumption that the customer needs to buy a new "thing" from you. Sometimes, the best solution is one that re-architects the world around the job, making the old problems simply disappear.
The Go / No-Go Decision: Do You Even Need a Survey?
Once you have these three Pre-Concepts clearly articulated, you have a powerful lens through which to evaluate your initial startup idea. Before you spend a dime on market research, a single hour on a customer interview, or a single brain cycle on a feature list, you can run your idea through a simple but brutal litmus test.
Gather your founding team and ask these questions:
The Magic Wand Test: On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is the "Magic Wand" concept, how much closer does our idea get the customer to a perfect outcome compared to their current solution? If you’re only moving the needle from a 4 to a 5, is that a big enough leap to win? Breakthrough innovations are often 8s, 9s, or 10s.
The No-Tech Test: Does our idea truly address the fundamental human needs we uncovered in the "No-Tech" concept? Are we solving for the core need for trust, clarity, communication, or risk reduction, or are we just layering technology on top of those issues without resolving them?
The System-Level Test: Is there a simpler process change or system-level innovation that could get the job done just as well, or even better, than our proposed product? Are we sure we need to build a product, or could we deliver more value as consultants or by changing the business model?
The Abstraction Test: Does our solution get the job done with fewer visible features and steps for the user? Or are we adding complexity? Remember, true innovation hides complexity; it doesn't expose it.
This process is about having the hard, critical conversation internally first. If your idea doesn't hold up to this scrutiny—if it feels incremental, fails to address the core need, or is less elegant than a simple process change—then you have a decision to make. You can pivot to a better idea, or you can kill it.
Killing an idea at this stage is a massive victory. It costs you nothing but a few hours of focused thinking. Killing an idea after you’ve raised a seed round and hired a team is a catastrophe. This framework gives you the intellectual honesty to know the difference.
A Practical Example: From "AI Project Manager" to "Effortless Team Alignment"
Let's walk through how this works with a classic tech-bro idea.
The Seductive but Flawed Idea: "TaskFlow AI"
Meet Alex. Alex is a talented engineer who has worked at several large tech companies. He's experienced the pain of slow, inefficient projects firsthand. He's convinced the problem is a lack of sophisticated tooling.
His idea is "TaskFlow AI." It's a next-generation project management platform. Using a powerful AI, it will scan all of a company's documents and communications, automatically generate a hyper-detailed project plan with dependencies, create a Gantt chart that would make a battleship commander weep with joy, and auto-assign every single task to the "optimal" team member based on their skills and workload.
On the surface, it sounds amazing. It's technologically impressive. It promises to solve the chaos of project management. Alex is already picturing the TechCrunch headline. He's on the bottom rung of the Abstraction Ladder, and he's in love with his solution.
Applying the Framework: A New Perspective
Before he starts building, his co-founder convinces him to run it through the Pre-Concept framework.
Magic Wand Concept: They ask, "If a project manager could wave a magic wand, what would happen?" The answer isn't "a perfect Gantt chart." The answer is "The project is finished, perfectly, on time, and on budget, with zero surprises." They realize the real job isn't managing tasks; it's eliminating uncertainty and risk.
No-Tech Concept: They ask, "How did a great manager run a project in 1980?" They didn't have AI. They had a whiteboard, daily check-ins, and they spent their time talking to people. They cleared roadblocks, ensured everyone was clear on the next step, and fostered communication. The fundamental job, they realize, is about achieving and maintaining team alignment.
System-Level Concept: They ask, "Could we get this job done without new software?" They realize that many project issues stem from a poor meeting culture. A shift from long, weekly status meetings to short, daily stand-ups could solve many of the alignment problems without any new tool.
Suddenly, "TaskFlow AI" doesn't look so brilliant. It's a monument to complexity. It automates the creation of artifacts (Gantt charts, task lists) that are, at best, a proxy for the real job of alignment. It adds a new, complex system for the team to learn and manage. It doesn't get closer to the magic wand outcome of "zero surprises"; it just documents the path to potential surprises in excruciating detail. It fails the abstraction test: it adds complexity, it doesn't hide it.
The team now understands the higher-order job: achieve effortless team alignment and proactively eliminate uncertainty. The playing field has changed completely.
Novel Concept Exploration & Creativity Triggers
With this new, higher-level job in mind, they can now ideate on solutions that are simpler, more elegant, and far more valuable. Using a few creativity triggers can help.
Here’s what they came up with:
Notice how all three of these ideas are vastly different from the original "TaskFlow AI." They are simpler for the end-user, more focused, and they attack the higher-order job directly. Alex and his team now have a portfolio of truly innovative concepts to explore, any of which is more likely to succeed because it was born from a deep understanding of the problem, not a fascination with a particular technology.
Conclusion: Build From the Future, Not From the Feature
The journey from a raw idea to a successful product is treacherous. The easiest way to get lost is to fixate on the map of your own solution instead of the destination your customer wants to reach.
The framework of Pre-Concepts—Magic Wand, No-Tech, and System-Level—is your compass. It forces you to lift your head, look at the horizon, and orient yourself toward the true North of customer value. It helps you climb the Abstraction Ladder and see the problem space with fresh eyes.
This front-loading of critical, structured thinking isn't a detour; it's a shortcut. It allows you to kill bad ideas when they are free to kill and nurture good ideas based on a solid foundation. It's the essential discipline that separates the frantic activity of building features from the focused progress of creating breakthrough innovations.
So before you fall in love with your next brilliant idea, stop. Take a step back. And ask yourself: What would magic look like? What is the timeless need? And could I change the system instead of building another product?
Build from that future, not from your feature list. Your time, your money, and your future customers will thank you for it.
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Mike Boysen - www.pjtbd.com
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