Why Most Smart People Solve the Wrong Problems (And How Product Taught Me Otherwise)
- Tushar
- Dec 4
- 6 min read
For a long time, I believed that if you are intelligent, hardworking, and deeply involved in execution, you will automatically end up solving the right problems. I was wrong.
Some of the costliest mistakes of my career did not come from lack of effort or poor intent. They came from solving the wrong problem with full conviction. This realisation did not come from a book or a framework. It came from watching good ideas fail quietly, and flawed assumptions reveal themselves only after real money, real time, and real trust were already spent.
This is not a story about features. This is a story about how problem framing shapes everything that follows.
Table of Contents
When I First Solved a “Big” Problem That Was Not the Right One
When my e-commerce business was doing steady volumes on marketplaces, I started thinking about the bigger picture. Commissions were rising. Visibility was being controlled through ads. Margins were getting thinner. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) felt like the obvious future of commerce. And strategically, that thought was correct.
So I decided to build our own D2C arm. On paper, the problem looked like this:
“We should not depend on marketplaces. We need our own traffic, our own customers, and our own brand.”
At the time, this felt like excellent problem framing. It was not. What I had actually framed was a strategic ambition, not an operational reality. Here is what I completely underestimated:
I was already handling 50+ daily orders myself.
I was sourcing products, packing them, dispatching, and handling customer queries.
I was managing inventory, pricing, and promotions.
I had no additional team bandwidth.
I deeply underestimated how hard traffic generation truly is for a new D2C brand.
After launching our D2C web-application I faced two choices:
Grow traffic organically — slow, content-heavy, relationship-driven.
Buy traffic through ads — fast, capital-heavy, volume-driven.
Because of time pressure, limited resources, and limited exposure back then, I chose paid traffic. What followed was predictable in hindsight:
High customer acquisition cost.
Low repeat behaviour.
Users who came for discounts, not for the brand.
Capital burn without long-term loyalty creation.
The product was not the real problem. The problem was that I framed independence from marketplaces as the core problem, while the real root problem was:
“I do not yet have the bandwidth, systems, or organic distribution muscle to run a true D2C engine.”
I solved what looked like the larger, more glamorous problem. I ignored the smaller, quieter constraint that actually governed success.
That is what wrong problem framing looks like in real life.
What Hundreds of User Conversations Slowly Changed in Me
Years later, while deeply involved in user research as a Product Manager, I encountered the same mistake again - this time inside technology teams. Most teams believe they are “user-driven” because they:
Conduct interviews.
Collect feedback.
Run surveys.
Track responses.
But there is a dangerous gap here. Users describe their problems using:
Their language.
Their habits.
Their social context.
Their behaviour often tells a very different story. Over time, I began seeing a repeated pattern: Users would articulate one problem loudly. But their actions consistently showed effort in solving something else.
That gap between what users say and what they repeatedly act upon is where wrong problem framing usually begins. The real work of a product manager is not to accept user statements. It is to interpret user behaviour without ego, urgency, or personal attachment.
When a Product Failed Because the Problem Was Imagined, Not Lived
While working with an early-stage startup as a fractional Product Manager, I saw this mistake at a much sharper edge. The founder had built an application that allowed homeowners to:
Assign tasks to their domestic staff.
Track daily chores.
Monitor completion digitally.
The application was built. Marketing had started. Ads were running. Yet conversions were negligible. The founder’s core assumption was simple:
“Urban homeowners struggle to delegate tasks and track household staff efficiently.”
On the surface, this sounded logical. In reality, it was mostly untrue. And when I conducted real user conversations across metro cities, two uncomfortable truths emerged:
Most households already had a working delegation system:
Verbal communication.
Sticky notes.
Informal coordination. There was no strong pain in delegation itself.
A critical infrastructure assumption collapsed instantly:
Most domestic staff did not have smartphones.
The entire product depended on staff usage.
The adoption layer simply did not exist.
The product worked exactly as designed. The problem simply did not matter enough at scale. The founder had not framed a validated problem. He had framed a personally imagined inconvenience, shaped by his own environment.
Only after reframing did real decisions become visible:
Either refine the audience to a very narrow segment.
Or redesign the system for basic phones.
Or exit the problem space altogether.
This is how product thinking actually operates. You do not defend what you built. You interrogate whether the problem itself deserves your years.
The Feature Trap I Have Seen Everywhere
Across startups, businesses, and product teams, I have seen this behaviour repeat endlessly:
Teams feel pressure to show movement.
Movement is equated with shipping.
Shipping is equated with progress.
So features keep getting built. Very few people are rewarded for saying: “We should pause. We may be solving the wrong problem.”
This creates what I silently call the feature comfort loop: Shipping reduces anxiety temporarily, even if it does not improve outcomes. Markets do not reward motion. They reward alignment with real pain.
How I Learned to Sit With Unclear Problems
This shift did not come naturally to me. As a founder, I was conditioned to:
Execute fast.
Produce visible output.
Chase immediate feedback.
Product management forced me to learn a new discipline: Sitting with incomplete certainty.
Two behavioural changes rewired my thinking permanently:
First, I separated discovery from validation. I stopped mixing:
“Is this a real problem?” with
“How should we solve this?”
Second, I removed leading language from conversations. Instead of asking:
“Would you use this feature?” I learned to ask: “What did you do the last time this situation occurred?”
Over time, I began trusting behaviour more than opinion. That single shift improved the quality of every decision I have made since.
Problem Framing Is the Quiet Superpower of Great Product Managers
A well-framed problem does three silent things:
It saves months of engineering effort.
It protects teams from wasted momentum.
It makes strategy visible without presentations.
In both my business journey and my product journey, execution was never the enemy. The problem definition was. Strong Product Managers do not begin with: “What should we build?”. They begin with: “What must remain broken if we do absolutely nothing?”. That one question filters out most false positives.
How You Can Practise Problem Framing Today (Without Any Product Title)
You do not need a product role to sharpen this skill. You can practise it immediately in three places:
At work: When an urgent task lands, ask yourself whether it addresses a root problem or only suppresses a symptom.
With users or customers: Observe what they repeatedly work around without complaining. Repeated workarounds reveal deeper pain than complaints.
Inside your own systems: Notice what consistently drains your time. Time leakage is often a poorly framed internal problem.
Problem framing is not a designation skill. It is a discipline of attention.
The Real Cost of Solving the Wrong Problem
Solving the wrong problem is expensive because it:
Consumes your best thinking.
Creates false confidence.
Delays real learning.
Quietly erodes trust over time.
Every major setback in my career that truly hurt has shared one root cause: The wrong problem was stabilised too early.
Smart, capable people rarely fail in product because they lack intelligence. They fail because they fall in love with their first interpretation of reality. Most good products are not born from brilliant ideas. They are born from stubborn honesty about what is truly broken. If you can resist the urge to solve quickly, you automatically move into the top tier of product thinking.
If this reflection made you question how you currently define problems, and you feel you may be too close to your own assumptions to see them clearly.
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